Dialogue 3 — Transcript

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[00:02] Bob Dobbs: I'm here with Cameron McEwen again.

[00:05] Bob Dobbs: Our first recording got cut off at the

[00:08] Bob Dobbs: 53-minute mark,

[00:09] Bob Dobbs: and Cameron was just going to explain something that people are not familiar with,

[00:15] Bob Dobbs: researchers are not familiar with,

[00:17] Bob Dobbs: the NAEB.

[00:20] Bob Dobbs: So what were you going to say,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: Cameron,

[00:21] Bob Dobbs: about the NAEB and what we learned in that,

[00:24] Bob Dobbs: those files?

[00:25] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[00:26] Cameron McEwen: So you bring out the importance

[00:30] Cameron McEwen: In 1971,

[00:32] Cameron McEwen: of his conversation with Father Peyton,

[00:36] Cameron McEwen: where he says that the medium and the message run together,

[00:42] Cameron McEwen: and it's not clear where one is differentiated from the other.

[00:47] Cameron McEwen: And what this means,

[00:49] Cameron McEwen: in effect,

[00:50] Cameron McEwen: is that the whole idea of a medium is not yet clear in McLuhan mind,

[00:58] Cameron McEwen: or maybe it's...

[00:59] Cameron McEwen: Maybe it was too clear before and now it's become appropriately unclear.

[01:06] Cameron McEwen: But at any rate,

[01:06] Cameron McEwen: that's 1971.

[01:09] Cameron McEwen: But what I wanted to bring out was that already in 1959,

[01:14] Cameron McEwen: just a year after he began saying the medium is the message,

[01:21] Cameron McEwen: which first came to him in the early part of May of 1958,

[01:28] Cameron McEwen: when he was at UBC,

[01:30] Cameron McEwen: and which he then repeated at some length at a conference in Washington,

[01:35] Cameron McEwen: D.C.

[01:36] Cameron McEwen: later that same month.

[01:38] Cameron McEwen: And that conference in Washington was where he met

[01:42] Cameron McEwen: Harry Skornia.

[01:44] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[01:45] Cameron McEwen: since our last conversation,

[01:47] Cameron McEwen: I've checked with people that knew Harry,

[01:49] Cameron McEwen: and the pronunciation of his name was Skornia,

[01:53] Cameron McEwen: not Scornia.

[01:54] Cameron McEwen: We're settled with that.

[01:56] Cameron McEwen: Anyway,

[01:56] Cameron McEwen: so he

[01:57] Cameron McEwen: Then in 1958 began a very intensive correspondence with Harry.

[02:07] Cameron McEwen: And anybody who knows the communication that

[02:13] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had with various people knows that his communication could become compulsive.

[02:21] Cameron McEwen: He might start writing every single week at a time when...

[02:27] Cameron McEwen: Letters had to be stamped and you get them to the post office.

[02:33] Cameron McEwen: And that's much more cumbersome procedure than what we now have.

[02:38] Cameron McEwen: But he would do it.

[02:40] Cameron McEwen: But his correspondence with Harry trumps all that.

[02:45] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes he would write Harry three or four times in a week.

[02:50] Cameron McEwen: And some of his letters to Harry are

[02:54] Cameron McEwen: 12 pages,

[02:55] Cameron McEwen: 15 pages,

[02:56] Cameron McEwen: 18 pages.

[02:58] Cameron McEwen: And Harry would,

[02:59] Cameron McEwen: there's one letter where Harry writes at the start,

[03:03] Cameron McEwen: he says something like,

[03:08] Cameron McEwen: what's the point of such a long letter?

[03:13] Cameron McEwen: How do we use something like this?

[03:16] Cameron McEwen: And then at the bottom of that same sheet,

[03:19] Cameron McEwen: there appears to be

[03:20] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan answer.

[03:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan answer was something like,

[03:25] Cameron McEwen: writing letters.

[03:27] Cameron McEwen: is a way of getting at new stuff that can be developed later.

[03:36] Cameron McEwen: So a letter isn't something where you inform somebody what you know,

[03:41] Cameron McEwen: what you're doing,

[03:42] Cameron McEwen: and all that sort of stuff.

[03:43] Cameron McEwen: You're kind of reaching into the future and finding stuff there that's a little bit indistinct,

[03:50] Cameron McEwen: but you're putting it down on paper to help bring it into a useful distinction.

[03:57] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[03:57] Bob Dobbs: let me say this.

[03:58] Bob Dobbs: Let me say this,

[04:00] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[04:01] Bob Dobbs: That is the role of the letter in Finnegan's Wake.

[04:04] Bob Dobbs: It's the ground.

[04:05] Bob Dobbs: The way you're talking about is what Joyce was doing with the letter.

[04:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[04:11] Cameron McEwen: So that's,

[04:13] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[04:15] Cameron McEwen: letter being a component of the word and the word being a component of a letter.

[04:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[04:24] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[04:24] Cameron McEwen: And so these.

[04:25] Cameron McEwen: This becomes very involuted,

[04:28] Cameron McEwen: especially for Joyce.

[04:31] Cameron McEwen: But at any rate,

[04:32] Cameron McEwen: when McLuhan was doing all of this correspondence,

[04:37] Cameron McEwen: what he was doing was filling out this idea that we don't know what media are,

[04:45] Cameron McEwen: and therefore we have to begin exploring it,

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: right?

[04:51] Cameron McEwen: So one of the things that...

[04:53] Cameron McEwen: I think people don't understand about McLuhan is when he talks about the coming together of art and science.

[05:01] Cameron McEwen: He has a very advanced view of science.

[05:05] Cameron McEwen: Most people think science,

[05:07] Cameron McEwen: well,

[05:07] Cameron McEwen: there's people in the lab and all that sort of stuff.

[05:10] Cameron McEwen: But for McLuhan,

[05:12] Cameron McEwen: his ideas are actually on science are actually quite close to those of T.S.

[05:18] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn.

[05:19] Cameron McEwen: And there,

[05:22] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn distinguishes between normal science and revolutionary science.

[05:27] Cameron McEwen: And one of the...

[05:30] Cameron McEwen: things that characterizes revolutionary science is that everything that normal science does becomes more or less meaningless and has to be recast.

[05:42] Cameron McEwen: And naturally,

[05:43] Cameron McEwen: this only can be done by great minds.

[05:46] Cameron McEwen: And it also requires a kind of social component that makes it possible,

[05:52] Cameron McEwen: because somebody can have great ideas that might revolutionize science.

[05:57] Cameron McEwen: But those ideas can become lost or they can become delayed.

[06:05] Cameron McEwen: The

[06:05] Cameron McEwen: Catholic priest who had the idea of genes and how they work wrote all of his stuff,

[06:13] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[06:13] Cameron McEwen: in the

[06:15] Cameron McEwen: 1850s.

[06:15] Cameron McEwen: And three or four different people independently discovered his stuff in the first decade of the

[06:24] Cameron McEwen: 20th century,

[06:25] Cameron McEwen: 50 or 60.

[06:26] Cameron McEwen: years later,

[06:28] Cameron McEwen: and then genetics grew out of those discoveries.

[06:33] Cameron McEwen: But for 50 or 60 years,

[06:34] Cameron McEwen: it had been completely buried.

[06:37] Cameron McEwen: So what McLuhan tries to set out,

[06:41] Cameron McEwen: or what McLuhan is grappling to set out,

[06:45] Cameron McEwen: is what do we need to do in order to found the science of media Thank you.

[06:56] Cameron McEwen: that might be.

[06:58] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't know what it is.

[07:00] Cameron McEwen: All he knows is we need to get there with scare quotes around there because the destination is unknown.

[07:10] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[07:10] Bob Dobbs: I just want to say that Kuhn's book comes out in 62.

[07:14] Bob Dobbs: So Marshall,

[07:15] Bob Dobbs: he's not being influenced by Kuhn.

[07:18] Bob Dobbs: He's just delighted when he reads it a few years later,

[07:21] Bob Dobbs: it confirms what he proceeded to have.

[07:25] Bob Dobbs: view science is.

[07:26] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[07:27] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[07:27] Cameron McEwen: And

[07:28] Cameron McEwen: I don't know this for sure,

[07:30] Cameron McEwen: but it's possible that I was the person that brought

[07:34] Cameron McEwen: Kuhn's book to McLuhan attention,

[07:36] Cameron McEwen: because Kuhn was my advisor in my junior year.

[07:40] Cameron McEwen: And

[07:42] Cameron McEwen: I was reading

[07:44] Cameron McEwen: Structure of Scientific Revolutions in very detailed fashion with Kuhn in,

[07:51] Cameron McEwen: that would have been 1964-65.

[07:55] Cameron McEwen: Just after the book came out.

[07:58] Cameron McEwen: So then when I met Marshall,

[08:02] Cameron McEwen: I emphasized to him that I thought his work had a lot to do with the work of Kuhn.

[08:08] Cameron McEwen: And then it didn't go any further.

[08:12] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[08:14] Bob Dobbs: didn't you meet him in 70?

[08:16] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[08:17] Cameron McEwen: the more I think about it,

[08:18] Cameron McEwen: the more I think it must have been in the fall of 68.

[08:22] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[08:23] Bob Dobbs: because he has it in Counterblast.

[08:28] Cameron McEwen: Maybe.

[08:29] Cameron McEwen: I don't remember that he has it there.

[08:31] Cameron McEwen: I know that around 1970 it shows up.

[08:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[08:37] Bob Dobbs: we can check that.

[08:39] Bob Dobbs: What university are you at when you're with Kuhn?

[08:43] Cameron McEwen: Princeton.

[08:43] Bob Dobbs: Princeton,

[08:44] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[08:46] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[08:46] Bob Dobbs: You might get that credit.

[08:50] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[08:50] Cameron McEwen: I'm not too interested in that.

[08:53] Cameron McEwen: But at any rate,

[08:54] Cameron McEwen: what McLuhan is setting out in these long letters and stuff,

[08:58] Cameron McEwen: and remember that

[09:00] Cameron McEwen: N-A-E-B, the E is educational,

[09:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[09:04] Cameron McEwen: National Association of

[09:05] Cameron McEwen: Educational Broadcasters.

[09:07] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[09:08] Cameron McEwen: So

[09:09] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had been casting about in the

[09:13] Cameron McEwen: 1950s for how he was going to find an audience,

[09:18] Cameron McEwen: and he had more or less given up.

[09:22] Cameron McEwen: on a literary audience,

[09:24] Cameron McEwen: and he didn't know enough for a technological audience,

[09:32] Cameron McEwen: and he hit upon education as the area where he might make his mark.

[09:40] Cameron McEwen: And so this tied back into his thesis on Nash a decade before,

[09:48] Cameron McEwen: which had often been...

[09:50] Cameron McEwen: about education,

[09:51] Cameron McEwen: the history of education for

[09:53] Cameron McEwen: 2,000 years,

[09:54] Cameron McEwen: you might say,

[09:55] Cameron McEwen: is one of its main topics.

[09:57] Cameron McEwen: So in the middle

[09:58] Cameron McEwen: 50s, he begins to lecture a lot.

[10:03] Cameron McEwen: and to at the

[10:04] Cameron McEwen: Columbia Teachers College and to publish essays in the Teachers College Journal.

[10:11] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[10:12] Cameron McEwen: And so by the end of the

[10:14] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, he's known as an educational theorist and one who is grappling with issues that everybody knows about but didn't have a handle on.

[10:28] Cameron McEwen: So the whole disconnect between teachers and their students.

[10:32] Cameron McEwen: and the whole disconnect between what we're educating our students for and what the real anti-environment like out there.

[10:42] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan is doing a lot of lecturing to educational associations,

[10:49] Cameron McEwen: to

[10:50] Cameron McEwen: English Language Teachers Association,

[10:52] Cameron McEwen: on and on.

[10:53] Bob Dobbs: That's when he meets Neil Postman,

[10:55] Bob Dobbs: I think.

[10:56] Bob Dobbs: Could be.

[10:58] Cameron McEwen: Could be.

[10:59] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[11:00] Cameron McEwen: That I don't know about.

[11:02] Cameron McEwen: But I do know that when he's talking about education,

[11:07] Cameron McEwen: as he was in May 1958 in Washington,

[11:12] Cameron McEwen: the conference was on education and new media,

[11:17] Cameron McEwen: was sponsored by NAEB and by the

[11:21] Cameron McEwen: Office of Education of the Department of

[11:24] Cameron McEwen: Health,

[11:26] Cameron McEwen: Education and Welfare.

[11:28] Cameron McEwen: And those two...

[11:30] Cameron McEwen: sponsors of the May 1958 conference would be the two people that funded and guided his Project 69,

[11:41] Cameron McEwen: which started the next year.

[11:44] Cameron McEwen: So he meets Harry in 1958,

[11:47] Cameron McEwen: end of May,

[11:48] Cameron McEwen: and right away the two of them realize that they can put together a project that the federal government might fund.

[12:00] Cameron McEwen: And I set out the background of this at my blog,

[12:04] Cameron McEwen: so I won't talk about it much.

[12:05] Cameron McEwen: But during the

[12:08] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, the educational folks were trying to get more money out of the federal government.

[12:16] Cameron McEwen: And they hit upon the idea of making education grants part of the defense funding,

[12:25] Cameron McEwen: because it was far easier to get money for defense out of the government than for education.

[12:31] Cameron McEwen: So they worked at that most of the decade and they finally succeeded in 1958.

[12:40] Cameron McEwen: So just at the time.

[12:41] Bob Dobbs: Who is they?

[12:42] Bob Dobbs: Who succeeded in 58?

[12:46] Cameron McEwen: Who succeeded in doing this?

[12:47] Cameron McEwen: There was there was a rough coalition between certain senators,

[12:54] Cameron McEwen: certain Congress people,

[12:57] Cameron McEwen: the NAEB.

[12:59] Cameron McEwen: certain universities and they were lobbying the federal government in various ways to try to get some you know it's minuscule money for the Defense Department but it's huge money for

[13:15] Cameron McEwen: educational research so they this coalition finally got some millions of dollars right peanuts in the defense budget

[13:26] Cameron McEwen: Millions of dollars were going to be dedicated to research in education of new media.

[13:35] Cameron McEwen: And that got passed in

[13:39] Cameron McEwen: 1958. So McLuhan and Harry realized immediately that they might be able to ramp up

[13:47] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan reputation as a theorist of the educational use of new media to get money.

[13:56] Cameron McEwen: And so in 1958,

[13:58] Cameron McEwen: in the fall,

[13:59] Cameron McEwen: they're putting together a description of a project,

[14:03] Cameron McEwen: which then was finalized in January and February 1959 and approved in

[14:11] Cameron McEwen: May of 1959 for a start in

[14:16] Cameron McEwen: September

[14:17] Bob Dobbs: 1959. Yeah.

[14:18] Cameron McEwen: So all this time,

[14:22] Cameron McEwen: for my purposes,

[14:23] Cameron McEwen: all of this history is sort of.

[14:25] Cameron McEwen: background stuff.

[14:27] Cameron McEwen: The important stuff occurs in McLuhan letters to

[14:32] Cameron McEwen: Harry because at just this time,

[14:37] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is at what I consider to be the top of his game.

[14:42] Cameron McEwen: In 1959,

[14:45] Cameron McEwen: he's going to start to have his blackouts.

[14:46] Cameron McEwen: 1960,

[14:48] Cameron McEwen: he's going to have a near fatal stroke.

[14:51] Cameron McEwen: All of the 1960s,

[14:52] Cameron McEwen: he's going to

[14:53] Cameron McEwen: 60s and 70s.

[14:54] Cameron McEwen: He's sick in various ways.

[14:56] Cameron McEwen: So in 1958,

[14:57] Cameron McEwen: 1959,

[15:00] Cameron McEwen: the time of all of this correspondence.

[15:04] Cameron McEwen: He's able to reap the benefit of the previous two and a half decades of thought and investigation and get

[15:22] Cameron McEwen: them on the record,

[15:23] Cameron McEwen: you might say,

[15:24] Cameron McEwen: but not as a finalized product.

[15:27] Cameron McEwen: Get it on the record as questions to be looked at.

[15:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[15:33] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[15:34] Cameron McEwen: And especially the question of if it's possible to have a science of this stuff,

[15:44] Cameron McEwen: how do we need to go to realize that science?

[15:48] Cameron McEwen: And what he emphasizes to Harry is that in order to get new ideas,

[15:54] Cameron McEwen: what you have to do is juggle ideas.

[15:57] Cameron McEwen: So you juggle ideas,

[15:59] Cameron McEwen: you talk about them,

[16:00] Cameron McEwen: you write about them.

[16:01] Cameron McEwen: And you continually sift them,

[16:04] Cameron McEwen: and you're looking for that moment when the safe clicks open,

[16:12] Bob Dobbs: right,

[16:12] Cameron McEwen: as he later describes it,

[16:14] Cameron McEwen: right?

[16:15] Cameron McEwen: And so that's what

[16:16] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan thinks he's doing in Project 69,

[16:20] Cameron McEwen: is trying to define the conditions of beginning rigorous investigation into these huge questions of...

[16:31] Cameron McEwen: education.

[16:33] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[16:33] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[16:33] Bob Dobbs: don't you relate that to the discovery of the elements or something,

[16:39] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[16:39] Bob Dobbs: in 1800 and McLuhan looking for the elements or media?

[16:44] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[16:46] Cameron McEwen: That's my that's my view.

[16:47] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[16:48] Bob Dobbs: You want to just say a sentence or two about that?

[16:50] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if we said it already.

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[16:53] Cameron McEwen: I'll just say that in my view,

[16:56] Cameron McEwen: what

[16:57] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was aiming at.

[17:00] Cameron McEwen: and some of this is described in the correspondence that we're talking about,

[17:03] Cameron McEwen: what he was aiming at was a revolution in our thinking about the humanities and the social sciences that would be analogous to the revolution that happened after 1800,

[17:18] Cameron McEwen: once people began to intuit the structure of elements,

[17:24] Cameron McEwen: chemical elements.

[17:25] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[17:26] Cameron McEwen: So the...

[17:28] Cameron McEwen: What he emphasizes to Harry over and over and over again,

[17:33] Cameron McEwen: and which is strangely absent from most McLuhan research,

[17:38] Cameron McEwen: is that

[17:39] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says the marker of making progress in this sort of stuff is that there will be no difference between what people do in school and what they do out of school.

[17:50] Cameron McEwen: And what he means by that is if somebody is doing freshman chemistry,

[17:55] Cameron McEwen: that's not a different chemistry.

[17:57] Cameron McEwen: from what

[17:58] Cameron McEwen: General Motors or Dow Chemical or anybody dealing with physical materials is doing,

[18:04] Cameron McEwen: right?

[18:04] Cameron McEwen: It might be simplified,

[18:06] Cameron McEwen: but it's the same thing,

[18:08] Cameron McEwen: right?

[18:09] Cameron McEwen: And so McLuhan says this divorce between the classroom anti-environment the larger environment outside points to a deficiency in our thinking about education,

[18:23] Cameron McEwen: right?

[18:23] Cameron McEwen: We need to find a way that these

[18:26] Cameron McEwen: Inside and outside are doing the same thing,

[18:30] Cameron McEwen: right?

[18:30] Cameron McEwen: Not to say identical,

[18:33] Cameron McEwen: not to say dead,

[18:35] Cameron McEwen: but they're involved in the same project,

[18:39] Cameron McEwen: you could say.

[18:40] Cameron McEwen: And according to McLuhan,

[18:43] Cameron McEwen: if we can introduce students to what's going on outside,

[18:50] Cameron McEwen: then the divorce between teacher and student or between...

[18:57] Bob Dobbs: the students idea of who am I and what they're doing in school these things will be revolutionized as well yes now is this as chemistry deals with physical elements is is media study with memes mental elements well

[19:15] Cameron McEwen: you see the whole question that we're involved with here is how does language work

[19:26] Cameron McEwen: how do media elements work and you can't presuppose that the distinction we might draw now between physical elements and mental elements is going to hold once we know what we're talking about right

[19:44] Cameron McEwen: so you have the long discussion of Baudelaire yeah exactly sorry

[19:53] Cameron McEwen: I got it mixed up with Baudelaire.

[19:54] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[19:56] Cameron McEwen: But what he's talking about is the failure of distinctions,

[20:01] Cameron McEwen: right?

[20:03] Cameron McEwen: You sort of follow on with his talk about the failure of distinctions.

[20:09] Cameron McEwen: And McLuhan would probably agree with much of what he has to say,

[20:14] Cameron McEwen: because the distinction between,

[20:19] Cameron McEwen: say,

[20:19] Cameron McEwen: physical and mental is something that we don't know much about because we don't have a way of rigorously investigating what the hell we're talking about.

[20:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[20:33] Cameron McEwen: As soon as we know what we're talking about,

[20:37] Cameron McEwen: then the explosion of knowledge will happen as it did in chemistry,

[20:45] Cameron McEwen: biology,

[20:47] Cameron McEwen: medicine,

[20:48] Cameron McEwen: genetics,

[20:49] Cameron McEwen: all this stuff since 1800.

[20:52] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[20:52] Bob Dobbs: I got two points to make,

[20:53] Bob Dobbs: maybe three.

[20:54] Cameron McEwen: Fire away,

[20:55] Cameron McEwen: fire away.

[20:56] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: remember,

[20:57] Bob Dobbs: the last 20 or 30 years.

[20:59] Bob Dobbs: They've done a lot in the lab with hooking the brain up with perception or something,

[21:03] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[21:04] Bob Dobbs: the cognitive studies.

[21:05] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what they call them,

[21:06] Bob Dobbs: but the military is flying planes with their thoughts and stuff like that,

[21:10] Bob Dobbs: right?

[21:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[21:12] Bob Dobbs: That is new knowledge,

[21:15] Bob Dobbs: and that might be getting into the finding out what's physical and what is not physical.

[21:22] Bob Dobbs: The other point is...

[21:26] Bob Dobbs: In the last recording,

[21:27] Bob Dobbs: we ended with you pointing out that the Scorny discussion is the beginning of,

[21:33] Bob Dobbs: say,

[21:33] Bob Dobbs: six years,

[21:34] Bob Dobbs: 58 to 64,

[21:35] Bob Dobbs: where he's doing Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media at the same time,

[21:39] Bob Dobbs: Understanding Media being Project 69.

[21:42] Bob Dobbs: So I wanted to point out that in Cliché to Archetype,

[21:46] Bob Dobbs: around page 100,

[21:48] Bob Dobbs: no,

[21:48] Bob Dobbs: I'm not sure what page,

[21:50] Bob Dobbs: in Cliché to Archetype,

[21:51] Bob Dobbs: he talks about Thomas

[21:53] Bob Dobbs: More's Utopia.

[21:56] Bob Dobbs: And he says it's an epilogue,

[21:58] Bob Dobbs: which is made up of two books.

[22:00] Bob Dobbs: Book one is a discussion of the medieval environment,

[22:05] Bob Dobbs: which was receding as they moved into the

[22:08] Bob Dobbs: Bloomberg Galaxy.

[22:10] Bob Dobbs: So it regards the medieval anti-environment art form.

[22:13] Bob Dobbs: And then in book two,

[22:15] Bob Dobbs: the way McLuhan describes it,

[22:16] Bob Dobbs: More explores his present,

[22:20] Bob Dobbs: the present time,

[22:22] Bob Dobbs: turning...

[22:23] Bob Dobbs: What does he do there?

[22:24] Bob Dobbs: What's his name?

[22:26] Bob Dobbs: turning the past into an art form.

[22:31] Bob Dobbs: It's a bit different from Book I.

[22:32] Bob Dobbs: Book I regards the medieval period as art form,

[22:35] Bob Dobbs: and then

[22:36] Bob Dobbs: Book II is exploring the present to hoik up the values of the past,

[22:42] Bob Dobbs: something like that.

[22:43] Bob Dobbs: So those were two aspects of the epilion of More's Utopia,

[22:48] Bob Dobbs: and in light of a lot of utopian thinking going on in the late 50s and early

[22:53] Bob Dobbs: 60s, Lacoon.

[22:54] Bob Dobbs: probes that.

[22:56] Bob Dobbs: And so the Gutenberg Galaxy is studying the print world and pre-print world,

[23:03] Bob Dobbs: the manuscript world,

[23:04] Bob Dobbs: as art form,

[23:05] Bob Dobbs: maybe even archetype.

[23:06] Bob Dobbs: And then in Understanding Media,

[23:08] Bob Dobbs: he's exploring the present with the electric media.

[23:11] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[23:12] Bob Dobbs: when I did his archives,

[23:13] Bob Dobbs: I found a one-pager that he had on the manuscript for

[23:18] Bob Dobbs: Understanding Media.

[23:19] Bob Dobbs: And it started off saying,

[23:21] Bob Dobbs: this book treats speech as an archetype.

[23:25] Bob Dobbs: So it's not print as an archetype,

[23:29] Bob Dobbs: like Gutenbergality,

[23:30] Bob Dobbs: it's speech.

[23:31] Bob Dobbs: But that's because there's a supposed retrieval of the oral world in the Electric Age.

[23:37] Bob Dobbs: So it's important to think of the epilion,

[23:42] Bob Dobbs: which Marshall writes about with Don Thiel in his book on Tennyson in the mid-50s,

[23:48] Bob Dobbs: the important role of the epilion.

[23:49] Bob Dobbs: And he says a lot of the modernists,

[23:52] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,

[23:52] Bob Dobbs: Eliot,

[23:53] Bob Dobbs: and Pound,

[23:54] Bob Dobbs: write epilia or epilions and uh so he's following in that mode uh with uh these huge epilions uh guber galaxy understand media so i want to make that point and then i don't remember the third one so it'll come up um let

[24:11] Cameron McEwen: me talk about the epilion for a minute yes um i can't i can't remember in the first recording if i pointed out that uh havelock eric havelock uh while he was at the University of Toronto.

[24:24] Cameron McEwen: published his first book in 1939 on Catalyst,

[24:29] Cameron McEwen: and then published a long three-part essay in 1946,

[24:35] Cameron McEwen: I think it was,

[24:36] Cameron McEwen: maybe the end of 45,

[24:37] Cameron McEwen: start of 46,

[24:40] Cameron McEwen: where again he talks about Apelia.

[24:43] Cameron McEwen: So I think that the notion of Apelia was abroad at the University of Toronto just as...

[24:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan arrived in 1946 and that he had this notion of aphelia kind of bouncing around in his brain.

[25:04] Cameron McEwen: And at the same time,

[25:08] Cameron McEwen: his friend

[25:09] Cameron McEwen: Giedion had been teaching at

[25:14] Cameron McEwen: MIT at the end of the

[25:17] Cameron McEwen: 1940s, and McLuhan knew about that.

[25:20] Cameron McEwen: And through

[25:21] Cameron McEwen: Giedion, he knew about Karl Deutsch,

[25:24] Cameron McEwen: and he knew about all of the work on cybernetics that was being done at MIT.

[25:33] Cameron McEwen: and he knew that

[25:34] Cameron McEwen: The key to this work in cybernetics was the computer,

[25:43] Cameron McEwen: or what was in the process of becoming the computer,

[25:47] Cameron McEwen: I should say,

[25:48] Cameron McEwen: just at this time,

[25:49] Cameron McEwen: and that the key to computation was digitality.

[25:54] Cameron McEwen: And so you have the pelia as a literary form,

[25:59] Cameron McEwen: which is always the...

[26:04] Cameron McEwen: bringing together of two different layers,

[26:10] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[26:12] Cameron McEwen: which is something that Eliot was already saying about Ulysses in the early

[26:17] Cameron McEwen: 1920s, right?

[26:18] Cameron McEwen: And so McLuhan knew

[26:20] Cameron McEwen: Eliot's essays very well,

[26:23] Cameron McEwen: knew about

[26:24] Cameron McEwen: Eliot talking about the echoing back and forth of

[26:28] Cameron McEwen: Homer and modern Dublin and Ulysses.

[26:33] Cameron McEwen: So

[26:34] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan was very tuned into what was perhaps the essence of modernity in literature and the essence of cybernetics in

[26:50] Cameron McEwen: technology.

[26:51] Cameron McEwen: And so he was trying to think about all of this sort of stuff.

[26:54] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[26:55] Bob Dobbs: let me throw in this part.

[26:56] Bob Dobbs: So

[26:57] Bob Dobbs: Giedion is in his thoughts through the

[27:00] Bob Dobbs: 40s, so Giedion is like the Scornia of the

[27:03] Bob Dobbs: 40s.

[27:04] Bob Dobbs: And let's see,

[27:06] Bob Dobbs: and then Hugh Kenner shows up,

[27:09] Bob Dobbs: 46,

[27:09] Bob Dobbs: 47.

[27:11] Bob Dobbs: But meanwhile,

[27:12] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel is at Yale studying with

[27:15] Bob Dobbs: Wimsatt and Brooks and whoever else was there,

[27:19] Bob Dobbs: that are professors who have read McLuhan PhD.

[27:23] Bob Dobbs: So they've got...

[27:24] Bob Dobbs: That thinking,

[27:25] Bob Dobbs: that going on in their head,

[27:26] Bob Dobbs: and he's thinking about what they're writing.

[27:29] Bob Dobbs: And

[27:30] Bob Dobbs: Don Thiel is a student of those,

[27:33] Bob Dobbs: Clenson and Brooks.

[27:35] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[27:35] Bob Dobbs: Brooks and Wimsatt.

[27:37] Bob Dobbs: So

[27:38] Bob Dobbs: Don shows up in 1950 and gives

[27:40] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan the human use of human beings or cybernetics.

[27:45] Bob Dobbs: Can't remember which.

[27:46] Bob Dobbs: But Don said that he turned McLuhan on to cybernetics and

[27:53] Bob Dobbs: MIT.

[27:54] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[27:54] Bob Dobbs: maybe the Giedion part or what you were saying might be a factor that Don didn't know about.

[27:59] Bob Dobbs: But so Don becomes,

[28:02] Bob Dobbs: after Kenner has gone to,

[28:07] Bob Dobbs: what did he go to?

[28:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:07] Cameron McEwen: Windsor and Yale.

[28:08] Cameron McEwen: No,

[28:08] Cameron McEwen: no,

[28:09] Bob Dobbs: he went to Yale,

[28:11] Bob Dobbs: yes,

[28:11] Bob Dobbs: in

[28:12] Bob Dobbs: 48, 49.

[28:14] Cameron McEwen: So he first took over.

[28:15] Bob Dobbs: No,

[28:16] Bob Dobbs: that's later.

[28:19] Cameron McEwen: No,

[28:20] Cameron McEwen: Kenner went from Toronto to McCormick.

[28:22] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan old job in Windsor.

[28:24] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[28:24] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[28:24] Bob Dobbs: in

[28:26] Cameron McEwen: 46. That's right.

[28:27] Cameron McEwen: At Windsor,

[28:28] Cameron McEwen: he then goes back and forth with McLuhan about where he should do his Ph.D.

[28:34] Cameron McEwen: and even if he should do his Ph.D.

[28:37] Cameron McEwen: And the outcome of that is him going to Brooks at Yale.

[28:42] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[28:42] Bob Dobbs: that's where McLuhan meets Pound,

[28:44] Bob Dobbs: which is another really important connection for McLuhan.

[28:47] Bob Dobbs: And Kenner is a...

[28:49] Bob Dobbs: obituary appraisal of McLuhan in the National Review in

[28:53] Bob Dobbs: January 81,

[28:55] Bob Dobbs: he says the most important thing that he got from McLuhan on a personal advisory level was the importance of getting a PhD.

[29:04] Bob Dobbs: It wasn't so obvious in the late

[29:06] Bob Dobbs: 40s but he went with that.

[29:08] Bob Dobbs: I'm going to get a PhD because McLuhan kind of recommended it and he said that was really important in his life career doing that to supplement what you're saying.

[29:18] Bob Dobbs: So meanwhile,

[29:18] Bob Dobbs: Kenner goes down to

[29:21] Bob Dobbs: Yale, and he's going to be dealing with the same professors Thiel is already dealing with.

[29:26] Bob Dobbs: And so Thiel comes to Toronto in 1950,

[29:29] Bob Dobbs: and he's only 22.

[29:31] Bob Dobbs: And he has a math background at Yale.

[29:36] Bob Dobbs: He's also in the class with George Bush and the guys that go on to do the

[29:40] Bob Dobbs: Skull and Bones and the CIA stuff.

[29:41] Bob Dobbs: He knew those people in his class.

[29:44] Bob Dobbs: He never got...

[29:46] Bob Dobbs: Raided or whatever the word is,

[29:47] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[29:48] Bob Dobbs: what do you call it when you raise somebody to join a frat?

[29:54] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[29:54] Cameron McEwen: maybe.

[29:55] Cameron McEwen: At Yale,

[29:56] Cameron McEwen: they don't exactly have fraternities,

[29:59] Cameron McEwen: but the societies that they have there...

[30:02] Cameron McEwen: Theol was Jewish,

[30:03] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[30:03] Cameron McEwen: right?

[30:04] Cameron McEwen: No,

[30:05] Cameron McEwen: no,

[30:05] Bob Dobbs: Don's not Jewish.

[30:07] Bob Dobbs: He's Catholic.

[30:07] Cameron McEwen: No.

[30:08] Bob Dobbs: He's Catholic.

[30:10] Cameron McEwen: I thought you said that he converted.

[30:14] Bob Dobbs: No,

[30:14] Bob Dobbs: that's Thal.

[30:15] Bob Dobbs: That's Nelson Thal.

[30:17] Bob Dobbs: T-H-A-L-L.

[30:19] Bob Dobbs: Don is T-H-E-A-L-L.

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[30:21] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[30:23] Cameron McEwen: No,

[30:23] Cameron McEwen: I know the distinction between the two of them.

[30:26] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[30:26] Cameron McEwen: good.

[30:26] Cameron McEwen: So that makes better sense to me because I was...

[30:30] Cameron McEwen: Actually going to question you about that because it just didn't compute.

[30:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[30:37] Cameron McEwen: all right,

[30:38] Cameron McEwen: good.

[30:38] Cameron McEwen: So where are we?

[30:40] Bob Dobbs: We're talking about Kenner and Thiel,

[30:43] Bob Dobbs: and you were going to say something.

[30:45] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[30:46] Cameron McEwen: I was going to say that perhaps,

[30:48] Cameron McEwen: as is true in my own talk about

[30:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and

[30:53] Cameron McEwen: Thomas Kuhn,

[30:55] Cameron McEwen: where I think I may have had some influence.

[30:59] Cameron McEwen: It's probably a human characteristic to think that one might have more credit than one actually did.

[31:08] Cameron McEwen: So

[31:09] Cameron McEwen: I think that McLuhan was already hooked into the Macy conferences before

[31:18] Cameron McEwen: Don showed up at the University of Toronto.

[31:21] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[31:21] Cameron McEwen: well,

[31:21] Bob Dobbs: here's two points.

[31:23] Bob Dobbs: We were talking about Kenner and the importance of a PhD and Kenner thanking McLuhan.

[31:27] Bob Dobbs: is

[31:28] Bob Dobbs: send-off after McLuhan died for that point.

[31:32] Bob Dobbs: But no,

[31:33] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[31:35] Bob Dobbs: he meets Don.

[31:36] Bob Dobbs: I could look at the actual letters in 1950 because I know he meets Don in June.

[31:42] Bob Dobbs: That's when he comes from Yale.

[31:44] Bob Dobbs: And Don's doing it to avoid the draft that was coming in with the Korean War.

[31:51] Bob Dobbs: And so he wanted to get to Canada.

[31:54] Bob Dobbs: But you'll see a letter

[31:56] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan writing to somebody saying the

[32:00] Bob Dobbs: MIT gangs are doing stuff way more important or more interesting than the literary clacks.

[32:07] Bob Dobbs: C-L-A-Q-U-E-S.

[32:08] Bob Dobbs: That was his term.

[32:10] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what that is.

[32:11] Cameron McEwen: It's a letter to pound.

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[32:14] Bob Dobbs: And he's saying that we can look up the date and see if it's before

[32:20] Bob Dobbs: Theo hands him the book in the mid-50s or after.

[32:24] Bob Dobbs: That's the question,

[32:25] Bob Dobbs: because if it's after.

[32:26] Bob Dobbs: June,

[32:27] Bob Dobbs: then I would give Don credit for making

[32:30] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan aware of this scene.

[32:32] Bob Dobbs: I don't think he was,

[32:33] Bob Dobbs: he wasn't talking about it to anybody in 49.

[32:38] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[32:39] Cameron McEwen: it's,

[32:39] Cameron McEwen: I think it's more,

[32:40] Cameron McEwen: it's a more complicated research question than that.

[32:43] Cameron McEwen: The letter to Pound,

[32:45] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[32:45] Cameron McEwen: is 1951.

[32:47] Cameron McEwen: So that would point to Don's importance in this regard.

[32:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[32:51] Cameron McEwen: But I believe,

[32:52] Cameron McEwen: I believe there's already stuff.

[32:55] Cameron McEwen: between McLuhan and Giedion in 49.

[32:58] Cameron McEwen: But it doesn't really matter.

[32:59] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[33:00] Cameron McEwen: all that matters is,

[33:02] Cameron McEwen: was McLuhan thinking about literature and technology together?

[33:09] Cameron McEwen: And did that influence him or prompt him or something to think about Apelia?

[33:15] Cameron McEwen: And the answer to that is clearly yes.

[33:18] Cameron McEwen: There's a long description in Martian that talks about

[33:23] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan becoming...

[33:25] Cameron McEwen: fascinated and obsessed with Apilia around 1950.

[33:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[33:31] Bob Dobbs: now it just occurred to me,

[33:33] Bob Dobbs: he defines Apilia as explaining God to man.

[33:38] Bob Dobbs: Now that would be the social world and the social conflict and the pain of the human condition.

[33:47] Bob Dobbs: That would involve technology,

[33:49] Bob Dobbs: whereas spiritual enlightenment or whatever you call it when you're doing your spiritual quest or...

[33:54] Bob Dobbs: or being a Catholic or something,

[33:57] Bob Dobbs: is not the world of the Apillian.

[34:01] Bob Dobbs: That's the world of the Epic,

[34:02] Bob Dobbs: maybe,

[34:03] Bob Dobbs: at least the Gnostic Epic.

[34:04] Bob Dobbs: Do you know what I'm saying?

[34:05] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[34:06] Cameron McEwen: I do,

[34:07] Cameron McEwen: but I think you're headed up a wrong tree there,

[34:11] Cameron McEwen: because the importance of the

[34:15] Cameron McEwen: Apillian form to McLuhan has to do with it being a medium.

[34:21] Cameron McEwen: It has to do with the form.

[34:24] Cameron McEwen: of thinking that's going on in both literature and in cybernetics.

[34:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[34:29] Bob Dobbs: that's what I'm saying,

[34:30] Bob Dobbs: that the appealing is more appropriate to media studies than the epic.

[34:37] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[34:37] Cameron McEwen: well,

[34:38] Cameron McEwen: sure.

[34:39] Cameron McEwen: The difference between the epic and the little epic,

[34:43] Cameron McEwen: in McLuhan thinking,

[34:44] Cameron McEwen: is the difference between the Gutenberg Galaxy and the electric age or the Marconi age.

[34:53] Bob Dobbs: So you don't see the

[34:55] Bob Dobbs: Guttmer-Gauss part of the epilion?

[34:59] Cameron McEwen: Here's the problem,

[35:00] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[35:01] Cameron McEwen: Let's say that

[35:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is tending towards defining the elements of human experience,

[35:11] Cameron McEwen: something like that.

[35:13] Cameron McEwen: Then those elements don't come into effect at a certain point in time.

[35:20] Cameron McEwen: What one discovers,

[35:22] Cameron McEwen: let's say in 1800,

[35:23] Cameron McEwen: when you discover,

[35:25] Cameron McEwen: first of all,

[35:26] Cameron McEwen: oxygen and then you go on to other gases and stuff.

[35:29] Cameron McEwen: You discover what was always there but not known.

[35:32] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[35:33] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[35:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[35:35] Cameron McEwen: So the form of Apelia was always being expressed during the Gutenberg Galaxy,

[35:44] Cameron McEwen: during the rise of Greek philosophy after the pre-Socratics,

[35:52] Cameron McEwen: etc.

[35:53] Cameron McEwen: It's just that it wasn't known.

[35:56] Cameron McEwen: But then...

[35:57] Cameron McEwen: the idea is that it becomes known,

[36:00] Cameron McEwen: and once it becomes known,

[36:01] Cameron McEwen: you have something like cybernetics.

[36:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[36:08] Bob Dobbs: I'll put that in consideration.

[36:11] Cameron McEwen: Good,

[36:11] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[36:12] Cameron McEwen: We're not speaking gospel here.

[36:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[36:14] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[36:15] Cameron McEwen: We're creating ideas.

[36:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[36:16] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[36:17] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[36:18] Bob Dobbs: so we were talking about Scornia,

[36:21] Bob Dobbs: and then I said,

[36:21] Bob Dobbs: well,

[36:23] Bob Dobbs: his colleagues in the 40s were Giedion.

[36:25] Bob Dobbs: and then Kenner and then Thiel,

[36:28] Bob Dobbs: and he does a lot of work on Finnegan's Wake with Thiel.

[36:31] Bob Dobbs: Didn't do that with Kenner,

[36:33] Bob Dobbs: and he had been interested in him.

[36:35] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure about that.

[36:37] Cameron McEwen: I think Kenner was the guy that got him to reconsider,

[36:40] Cameron McEwen: especially the Wake.

[36:44] Cameron McEwen: Kenner had expertise in Joyce,

[36:48] Cameron McEwen: unlike anybody that McLuhan had ever met.

[36:53] Bob Dobbs: I recall,

[36:53] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[36:54] Bob Dobbs: in Marshall McLuhan book that Kenner said that McLuhan avoided the wake.

[36:58] Bob Dobbs: But I'm not exactly positive about that.

[37:00] Bob Dobbs: But the thing is,

[37:02] Bob Dobbs: he was doing the wake with

[37:06] Bob Dobbs: Muller Time.

[37:08] Bob Dobbs: How do you say his name?

[37:09] Bob Dobbs: Muller Tim?

[37:09] Bob Dobbs: Muller Time?

[37:10] Cameron McEwen: Team.

[37:10] Cameron McEwen: Team.

[37:11] Cameron McEwen: Team.

[37:11] Bob Dobbs: Team.

[37:12] Bob Dobbs: And that's in 39.

[37:14] Bob Dobbs: So that was his main colleague in the late

[37:18] Bob Dobbs: 30s.

[37:19] Bob Dobbs: He is aware of the wake.

[37:20] Bob Dobbs: He's looking at it,

[37:21] Bob Dobbs: but he doesn't talk about it much in the

[37:24] Bob Dobbs: 40s. He talks about Elliott,

[37:25] Bob Dobbs: and he wants to do a book on Elliott with Kenner.

[37:29] Bob Dobbs: And then he wants to do Lewis in 49,

[37:31] Bob Dobbs: and he's telling

[37:33] Bob Dobbs: Kenner or

[37:35] Bob Dobbs: Felix. Has he met Felix yet?

[37:37] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[37:38] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[37:39] Cameron McEwen: They were colleagues in St.

[37:41] Cameron McEwen: Louis.

[37:42] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[37:42] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[37:42] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[37:42] Cameron McEwen: They met in 42.

[37:44] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[37:44] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[37:45] Bob Dobbs: so now he's got Don Thiel.

[37:47] Bob Dobbs: And they have...

[37:48] Bob Dobbs: and a very intense relationship.

[37:50] Bob Dobbs: They meet every day at Don's apartment from 50,

[37:54] Bob Dobbs: summer 50,

[37:54] Bob Dobbs: to 53,

[37:57] Bob Dobbs: when Don has to finish his PhD,

[37:59] Bob Dobbs: and he hasn't got time to answer McLuhan phone calls in the middle of the night and all that stuff,

[38:05] Bob Dobbs: and he's got a couple of kids,

[38:07] Bob Dobbs: so he's got to get his

[38:08] Bob Dobbs: PhD.

[38:09] Bob Dobbs: But Theo,

[38:10] Bob Dobbs: that's very intense,

[38:11] Bob Dobbs: 50-53,

[38:12] Bob Dobbs: while McLuhan also doing Pound,

[38:14] Bob Dobbs: and then

[38:15] Bob Dobbs: Theo does his PhD

[38:17] Bob Dobbs: on McLuhan classwork,

[38:19] Bob Dobbs: on the communication theories of Pound,

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: Elliott,

[38:21] Bob Dobbs: Joyce,

[38:22] Bob Dobbs: and

[38:23] Bob Dobbs: Yates, not Lewis.

[38:26] Bob Dobbs: He couldn't do Lewis because the paintings were locked up in the National Gallery or something in Ottawa.

[38:31] Bob Dobbs: So he thought he had to get access to the paintings.

[38:34] Bob Dobbs: And Marshall objected to him not including Lewis.

[38:38] Bob Dobbs: But you read his PhD.

[38:39] Bob Dobbs: Do you ever read Don's PhD?

[38:42] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[38:43] Cameron McEwen: I think I have it.

[38:46] Cameron McEwen: I believe I've read it,

[38:47] Cameron McEwen: but if I have,

[38:48] Cameron McEwen: it was like a decade ago,

[38:50] Cameron McEwen: and

[38:51] Cameron McEwen: I don't recall much about it.

[38:53] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[38:53] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting to me,

[38:54] Bob Dobbs: it's literally the classroom talk of Marshall.

[38:59] Bob Dobbs: And John was smart enough to,

[39:01] Bob Dobbs: as a young man,

[39:02] Bob Dobbs: to hear it and know it so he could write it.

[39:06] Bob Dobbs: No one else could.

[39:07] Bob Dobbs: You talk to

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: Murray Schafer,

[39:10] Bob Dobbs: who was in his classes in the early

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: 50s.

[39:13] Bob Dobbs: He didn't know what Marshall was talking about,

[39:15] Bob Dobbs: not the way Don was.

[39:16] Bob Dobbs: And,

[39:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[39:17] Bob Dobbs: you see the interview with that lady who was in that period.

[39:22] Bob Dobbs: She said that Don was the leader of their clique of McLuhan students who were into McLuhan.

[39:28] Bob Dobbs: Barbara somebody,

[39:29] Bob Dobbs: Pat,

[39:30] Bob Dobbs: Patricia,

[39:30] Bob Dobbs: somebody.

[39:32] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[39:33] Bob Dobbs: Don is a key guy right there.

[39:35] Bob Dobbs: And he also,

[39:37] Bob Dobbs: as Carpenter gets involved with

[39:39] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan,

[39:40] Bob Dobbs: Don is the secretary for the two of them when they make their application to the Ford situation in 52-53,

[39:49] Bob Dobbs: the Ford grant.

[39:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[39:51] Bob Dobbs: but we're talking about Scornia and the medium and the message.

[39:57] Bob Dobbs: That's what you,

[39:58] Bob Dobbs: I don't know,

[39:58] Bob Dobbs: did you finish that point about the NAEB correspondence?

[40:04] Cameron McEwen: No,

[40:04] Cameron McEwen: it just,

[40:05] Cameron McEwen: it ties in with your book,

[40:07] Cameron McEwen: and that the sorts of complications that you bring out for the

[40:14] Cameron McEwen: 1970s,

[40:15] Cameron McEwen: I believe were already present in the late

[40:19] Cameron McEwen: 1950s, and that...

[40:21] Bob Dobbs: No,

[40:21] Bob Dobbs: late,

[40:21] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[40:23] Bob Dobbs: late 50s,

[40:23] Bob Dobbs: that's right,

[40:24] Bob Dobbs: late 50s.

[40:25] Cameron McEwen: Late 50s,

[40:26] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[40:26] Cameron McEwen: And that we need to keep in mind that those questions and difficulties are in McLuhan mind as he finishes up,

[40:37] Cameron McEwen: at last,

[40:39] Cameron McEwen: the Gutenberg Galaxy and then transforms

[40:42] Cameron McEwen: Project 69 into Understanding Media.

[40:46] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[40:46] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[40:47] Bob Dobbs: I've seen you say that he figured out tactility in the late 50s,

[40:53] Bob Dobbs: and this is when he's in his prime.

[40:55] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you mean?

[40:56] Bob Dobbs: in the time of his prime,

[41:01] Cameron McEwen: he suddenly gets...

[41:02] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[41:02] Cameron McEwen: off the top of my head,

[41:05] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't want to date his concern with tactility because that's a very sort of broad question because as both of us know and as both of us have emphasized,

[41:22] Cameron McEwen: tactility is very...

[41:25] Cameron McEwen: powerful conception in McLuhan that doesn't have much to do with touch and has everything to do with the modulations of experience.

[41:39] Cameron McEwen: And this is something that you go into in various ways in your book.

[41:45] Cameron McEwen: And as we go through your book,

[41:47] Cameron McEwen: I think this is a topic that we're going to come up against all the time.

[41:53] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[41:54] Cameron McEwen: good.

[41:55] Cameron McEwen: All I would say as regards the dating of tactility is that he probably came to fit together tactility with his notions of the gap and resonance and stuff through

[42:12] Cameron McEwen: an essay on the Japanese term ma,

[42:17] Cameron McEwen: which,

[42:19] Cameron McEwen: who's the architect?

[42:20] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[42:20] Cameron McEwen: Fred Thompson.

[42:22] Cameron McEwen: Fred Thompson did that paper for him,

[42:25] Cameron McEwen: I believe,

[42:25] Cameron McEwen: in 1969.

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: late 60s.

[42:29] Bob Dobbs: I remember that.

[42:29] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[42:30] Cameron McEwen: So it was that paper of Fred Thompson that got McLuhan thinking about tactility as the gap.

[42:39] Cameron McEwen: A lot of his letters at that point in time,

[42:44] Cameron McEwen: the letters that you have put up on your site,

[42:47] Cameron McEwen: And very often they have to do with...

[42:51] Cameron McEwen: the gap or with nullity or with nothing.

[42:57] Cameron McEwen: And all of these things get associated with tactility in

[43:02] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan mind at the end of the

[43:05] Cameron McEwen: 60s and then throughout the

[43:08] Bob Dobbs: 1970s. Okay,

[43:09] Bob Dobbs: so what is the difference of influence of Scornia as a colleague,

[43:15] Bob Dobbs: as opposed to

[43:16] Bob Dobbs: Williams,

[43:17] Bob Dobbs: Jacqueline Turwitt?

[43:20] Bob Dobbs: Carpenter in the Explorations Group.

[43:23] Bob Dobbs: What is Scornia adding to it?

[43:25] Bob Dobbs: Is it just he's found his genre,

[43:27] Bob Dobbs: his audience,

[43:28] Bob Dobbs: educational broadcasters,

[43:30] Bob Dobbs: which he didn't have in the mid-50s?

[43:33] Cameron McEwen: I think what McLuhan found in Scornia is somebody who was somehow able to relate to McLuhan without much friction.

[43:47] Cameron McEwen: There was some friction.

[43:49] Cameron McEwen: Because the NAEB files have a correspondence between

[43:55] Cameron McEwen: Harry and other people in the organization.

[43:59] Cameron McEwen: And sometimes people are complaining about McLuhan,

[44:04] Cameron McEwen: sometimes rather violently.

[44:06] Cameron McEwen: And

[44:07] Cameron McEwen: Harry agrees with some aspects of what they're saying.

[44:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[44:12] Cameron McEwen: So

[44:13] Cameron McEwen: Harry was well aware of some of the difficulties of working with McLuhan.

[44:18] Cameron McEwen: But.

[44:18] Cameron McEwen: He was able to work with McLuhan in a way that McLuhan did not feel that constrained him.

[44:25] Cameron McEwen: And what happened with the Explorations Group is that everybody,

[44:31] Cameron McEwen: including Carpenter,

[44:33] Cameron McEwen: especially including Easterbrook,

[44:37] Cameron McEwen: came across to McLuhan as constraining.

[44:41] Cameron McEwen: He believed that everybody in the Explorations Group had

[44:46] Cameron McEwen: Gutenbergian minds.

[44:48] Cameron McEwen: And he was very frustrated that in the three years of the seminar...

[44:53] Cameron McEwen: He wasn't able to get them to see the difference between how they were thinking and what he was trying to talk about as a new sort of thinking.

[45:06] Cameron McEwen: He just regarded the whole thing as a failure by 1956.

[45:10] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[45:11] Bob Dobbs: and he's also not doing too much with Don Thiel anymore either,

[45:16] Bob Dobbs: so he's alone.

[45:17] Bob Dobbs: So he does the verbi-vocal visual in 1957,

[45:22] Bob Dobbs: and then Lewis dies.

[45:23] Bob Dobbs: in March 57.

[45:25] Bob Dobbs: So he's becoming a solo performer in the late 50s.

[45:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[45:29] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[45:29] Cameron McEwen: remember,

[45:30] Cameron McEwen: this ties in with what we were talking about earlier with the Columbia College of

[45:37] Cameron McEwen: Teachers. Yes.

[45:39] Cameron McEwen: Because it's at the end of the exploration seminar that

[45:46] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan decides he has to find some different audience.

[45:51] Cameron McEwen: And he turns to education theory as a possibility.

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[45:55] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[45:57] Bob Dobbs: so that's,

[45:59] Bob Dobbs: I think that's the background.

[46:03] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[46:03] Bob Dobbs: look at your notes.

[46:04] Bob Dobbs: What else do you remember we said that didn't get recorded?

[46:11] Cameron McEwen: I think one point that I'd like to bring out,

[46:14] Cameron McEwen: and I'm not sure how much got recorded or not.

[46:19] Cameron McEwen: But at the very beginning,

[46:21] Cameron McEwen: I talked a little bit about how we agree that McLuhan could see things that other people couldn't see.

[46:28] Cameron McEwen: And that this was a trait that he had his whole life long.

[46:32] Cameron McEwen: And

[46:33] Cameron McEwen: I like to think of it as second sight.

[46:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[46:38] Cameron McEwen: And I found,

[46:40] Cameron McEwen: partly because of your book,

[46:42] Cameron McEwen: I found what I take to be a great example of this.

[46:46] Cameron McEwen: So on...

[46:49] Cameron McEwen: Your page is 7274.

[46:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[46:54] Cameron McEwen: If you happen to have that in front of you,

[46:56] Cameron McEwen: you bring out a long quotation from

[47:01] Cameron McEwen: A Garbage Apocalypse from

[47:03] Cameron McEwen: 1970. And you go on to explain that you found the publication with this essay in Dennis Young's library.

[47:16] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[47:16] Bob Dobbs: the Art Critics Conference in Ottawa.

[47:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[47:19] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[47:20] Cameron McEwen: So then on the basis of what you say in the book,

[47:25] Cameron McEwen: I was able to find online a

[47:29] Cameron McEwen: PDF version of that book.

[47:32] Bob Dobbs: Wow.

[47:32] Cameron McEwen: It wasn't easy to find,

[47:34] Cameron McEwen: but it's there.

[47:35] Cameron McEwen: And the reason it's not easy to find is it's not in text.

[47:39] Cameron McEwen: It's only an image.

[47:41] Cameron McEwen: So then what I did was

[47:45] Cameron McEwen: I...

[47:46] Cameron McEwen: took the image and converted it into text,

[47:51] Cameron McEwen: and I'm going to put it up on my blog because it's already on the Internet.

[47:57] Cameron McEwen: I don't think there's any rights problem with putting it up,

[48:00] Cameron McEwen: so I'm going to put it up.

[48:03] Cameron McEwen: And what I found as I was doing the work to digitize this essay is what I regard as a fabulous example of second sight.

[48:15] Cameron McEwen: And what I'll do is I'll just read you this very short passage.

[48:20] Cameron McEwen: It's only one sentence.

[48:22] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[48:23] Cameron McEwen: So he says,

[48:27] Cameron McEwen: the section that you have in the book has to do with percept and concept and with primitives and with human beings becoming hunters again.

[48:39] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[48:40] Cameron McEwen: And it's in this context that he says the following.

[48:45] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[48:46] Cameron McEwen: when you are at a loss for words,

[48:49] Cameron McEwen: you tend to resort to gestures and grunts.

[48:52] Cameron McEwen: And like I mean,

[48:54] Cameron McEwen: man,

[48:55] Cameron McEwen: right,

[48:55] Cameron McEwen: that's a quotation you could say.

[48:57] Cameron McEwen: Have you not,

[48:58] Cameron McEwen: no,

[48:58] Cameron McEwen: this is a new sentence.

[48:59] Cameron McEwen: Have you not noticed that language is disappearing very rapidly?

[49:05] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[49:05] Cameron McEwen: so he's talking there about how the electric world,

[49:12] Cameron McEwen: the Marconi world,

[49:14] Cameron McEwen: is.

[49:15] Cameron McEwen: going to replicate the Paleolithic world,

[49:18] Cameron McEwen: right?

[49:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[49:20] Cameron McEwen: But what he's talking about there in 1970 is exactly what's going to happen to him in 1979.

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[49:29] Cameron McEwen: When you were at a loss for words,

[49:31] Cameron McEwen: you tend to resort to gestures and grunts.

[49:34] Cameron McEwen: And like I mean,

[49:36] Cameron McEwen: man,

[49:36] Bob Dobbs: right?

[49:37] Cameron McEwen: Didn't he only have one or two phrases that he used all the time?

[49:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[49:42] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[49:42] Cameron McEwen: boy,

[49:43] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[49:43] Cameron McEwen: boy.

[49:43] Bob Dobbs: It was one of them old boys.

[49:44] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[49:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[49:45] Cameron McEwen: Exactly.

[49:47] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[49:47] Cameron McEwen: And then he says,

[49:48] Cameron McEwen: have you not noticed that language is disappearing very rapidly?

[49:54] Cameron McEwen: And so here we need to say,

[49:56] Cameron McEwen: have you not noticed,

[49:57] Cameron McEwen: he's talking about the lecture audience in Ottawa,

[50:00] Cameron McEwen: I guess,

[50:02] Cameron McEwen: that you is first and foremost

[50:05] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan himself,

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: right?

[50:07] Cameron McEwen: Have you not noticed that language is disappearing very rapidly,

[50:11] Cameron McEwen: right?

[50:12] Cameron McEwen: So what's interesting about this is we can take from this some important characteristics of second sight that we always need to remember.

[50:23] Cameron McEwen: when we're reading McLuhan.

[50:26] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[50:27] Bob Dobbs: let me bring in my story about that.

[50:30] Bob Dobbs: But in War and Peace in the Global Village in 1968,

[50:33] Bob Dobbs: he talks,

[50:34] Bob Dobbs: he makes this sentence about language is fading out,

[50:38] Bob Dobbs: speech is fading out.

[50:39] Bob Dobbs: He says that in War and Peace,

[50:42] Bob Dobbs: what you're saying he did in 1970.

[50:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[50:45] Bob Dobbs: well,

[50:46] Bob Dobbs: that's great that you have that book.

[50:49] Bob Dobbs: That's good.

[50:50] Bob Dobbs: All right.

[50:51] Cameron McEwen: In 1970...

[50:53] Cameron McEwen: But wait a sec,

[50:53] Cameron McEwen: before you leave,

[50:56] Cameron McEwen: it's very important to think about what the characteristics are of such second sight.

[51:07] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[51:07] Bob Dobbs: he gives one example of one type,

[51:10] Bob Dobbs: but remember in Take Today in 72,

[51:12] Bob Dobbs: he's saying ESP is old hat.

[51:14] Bob Dobbs: There's a new kind of second sight that he's probing around with.

[51:19] Cameron McEwen: No,

[51:21] Cameron McEwen: old hat.

[51:22] Cameron McEwen: It doesn't mean old in the usual sense,

[51:25] Cameron McEwen: right?

[51:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[51:27] Bob Dobbs: but then he goes on,

[51:28] Bob Dobbs: that's the title,

[51:29] Bob Dobbs: and then he goes into artistic awareness,

[51:33] Bob Dobbs: prophetic,

[51:34] Bob Dobbs: visionary awareness is obsolete.

[51:36] Bob Dobbs: He says that in

[51:37] Bob Dobbs: Take Today.

[51:39] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[51:39] Cameron McEwen: but you see,

[51:41] Cameron McEwen: this is something that we're going to talk about a lot in going through your book.

[51:45] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[51:46] Cameron McEwen: Once you advance into the electric world,

[51:49] Cameron McEwen: into the all at once,

[51:51] Cameron McEwen: than the opposite.

[51:52] Cameron McEwen: obsolete and the out of date and all that sort of stuff has an entirely different meaning right old hat is completely different depending upon whether you're talking in linear terms or if you're talking in all

[52:08] Bob Dobbs: at once terms yeah intake today in the table of contents doesn't have old is new and new is old exactly exactly yeah and that's how the book ends actually in talking about that stuff.

[52:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[52:20] Bob Dobbs: and then it's S-A-N-V-V-V-57,

[52:23] Bob Dobbs: electronics as ESP.

[52:25] Bob Dobbs: It says it blatantly there.

[52:27] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[52:28] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[52:29] Bob Dobbs: so here's my story,

[52:31] Bob Dobbs: which I said,

[52:31] Bob Dobbs: but we don't have that part of the recording.

[52:36] Bob Dobbs: So what happened is in November 74,

[52:39] Bob Dobbs: he's interviewed by June Callwood,

[52:41] Bob Dobbs: who is the

[52:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan of feminism in Canada.

[52:45] Bob Dobbs: She's a top journalist,

[52:46] Bob Dobbs: very high-profile person.

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: You remember her,

[52:48] Bob Dobbs: right?

[52:49] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[52:50] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[52:51] Bob Dobbs: And it's almost like she deserved the private McLuhan.

[52:55] Bob Dobbs: So she comes to interview him,

[52:56] Bob Dobbs: and he talks a lot about his kids and very personal stuff.

[53:00] Bob Dobbs: And this is not in the article what I'm going to tell you,

[53:04] Bob Dobbs: but I got from somebody a copy of the recording.

[53:08] Bob Dobbs: And in the recording,

[53:09] Bob Dobbs: he goes on about how he has ESP and what a problem it is.

[53:13] Bob Dobbs: It gets in the way of his life.

[53:16] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[53:17] Bob Dobbs: for example...

[53:18] Bob Dobbs: I have a friend who's in New Guinea,

[53:20] Bob Dobbs: and I know exactly what they're thinking and what they're experiencing.

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[53:23] Bob Dobbs: this happens to me,

[53:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[53:25] Bob Dobbs: daily.

[53:26] Bob Dobbs: So he's actually saying to her that he's,

[53:28] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[53:28] Bob Dobbs: a psychic,

[53:30] Bob Dobbs: which is something you don't say to people too much,

[53:32] Bob Dobbs: especially in universities.

[53:34] Bob Dobbs: So she doesn't comment on it.

[53:38] Bob Dobbs: She doesn't develop it or explore it,

[53:39] Bob Dobbs: and she deletes it from her article.

[53:42] Bob Dobbs: Doesn't go into it.

[53:43] Bob Dobbs: But luckily,

[53:44] Bob Dobbs: I heard the recording,

[53:46] Bob Dobbs: and...

[53:47] Bob Dobbs: He talks about having ESP.

[53:49] Bob Dobbs: And so there's that.

[53:50] Bob Dobbs: And then it turns out in the summer of 74,

[53:54] Bob Dobbs: I called him,

[53:56] Bob Dobbs: and he was talking about Eric getting the essay on Finnegan's Wake in the James George quarterly.

[54:02] Bob Dobbs: And I know that was like the summer of 74 issue.

[54:05] Bob Dobbs: And he was telling me how great it was,

[54:07] Bob Dobbs: and it was just happening.

[54:08] Bob Dobbs: So that means I was talking to him around the summer of 74.

[54:12] Bob Dobbs: And

[54:13] Bob Dobbs: I mentioned something about my diet.

[54:14] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[54:15] Bob Dobbs: well,

[54:16] Bob Dobbs: I don't think you should eat too many bananas.

[54:19] Bob Dobbs: I was eating a lot of bananas.

[54:21] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[54:22] Bob Dobbs: Edgar Cayce says that's not good.

[54:24] Bob Dobbs: He quotes Edgar Cayce for God's sake,

[54:27] Bob Dobbs: or for psychic sake.

[54:28] Bob Dobbs: Now you know who Edgar Cayce is.

[54:31] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: Famous,

[54:32] Bob Dobbs: the most famous medium of the 20th century,

[54:34] Bob Dobbs: the sleeping prophet,

[54:35] Bob Dobbs: he was called.

[54:36] Bob Dobbs: But here's McLuhan,

[54:38] Bob Dobbs: like Don said,

[54:39] Bob Dobbs: they read this,

[54:41] Bob Dobbs: the world of kook in the early 50s,

[54:42] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[54:43] Bob Dobbs: and they're looking into alchemy.

[54:46] Bob Dobbs: But if McLuhan knew he had ESP...

[54:49] Bob Dobbs: then he would sneakily be looking into people that talked about that stuff,

[54:53] Bob Dobbs: like Casey.

[54:55] Bob Dobbs: So it's a big part of Marshall's life.

[54:57] Bob Dobbs: And he actually went to the Evergreens,

[54:59] Bob Dobbs: the very good medium in 1976 that I did for many years.

[55:04] Bob Dobbs: So that's what,

[55:06] Bob Dobbs: if you want to go into that,

[55:07] Bob Dobbs: that's great as we talk.

[55:11] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[55:12] Cameron McEwen: maybe,

[55:12] Cameron McEwen: but

[55:14] Cameron McEwen: I have a different take on that stuff.

[55:17] Cameron McEwen: from what you do,

[55:18] Cameron McEwen: I believe.

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: No,

[55:19] Bob Dobbs: no,

[55:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm a postmodern on ESP.

[55:24] Bob Dobbs: I've been developing an idea of what ESP is,

[55:26] Bob Dobbs: not the way the New Ager woo-woo people do it.

[55:30] Bob Dobbs: I think there's a different kind of ESP going on.

[55:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[55:34] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[55:34] Cameron McEwen: and you have that in your book,

[55:36] Cameron McEwen: and we'll talk about that in those sections.

[55:39] Cameron McEwen: But what I want to bring out here is that let's say that you're a researcher.

[55:46] Cameron McEwen: And you're interested in compounds that might be useful in treating cancer.

[55:56] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[55:57] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[55:58] Cameron McEwen: there's no limit to the things that you're going to look at for anti-carcinogenic properties.

[56:06] Cameron McEwen: For example,

[56:07] Cameron McEwen: the other day I happened to be looking at the

[56:10] Cameron McEwen: Japanese news channel,

[56:12] Cameron McEwen: and they had a little

[56:14] Cameron McEwen: 15-minute feature.

[56:15] Cameron McEwen: on a woman whose specialty is the mushrooms that grow in the deep sea,

[56:23] Cameron McEwen: like at 5,000 meters or something like this.

[56:27] Cameron McEwen: And she goes down in submersibles and they're able to pluck some of these mushrooms.

[56:36] Cameron McEwen: And when they get up to the lab,

[56:39] Cameron McEwen: she grows them and then she tests them for various

[56:44] Cameron McEwen: qualities,

[56:45] Cameron McEwen: one of which is whether they have an effect on eradicating or slowing down cancer,

[56:51] Cameron McEwen: right?

[56:52] Cameron McEwen: So when

[56:55] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is looking at stuff that's written or talked about or something like this,

[57:02] Cameron McEwen: there is absolutely no limit to what he thinks is capable of rigorous analysis,

[57:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[57:10] Cameron McEwen: And just like deep sea mushrooms or something.

[57:14] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[57:14] Cameron McEwen: So he doesn't look at psychics in the same way as everybody else does.

[57:21] Bob Dobbs: No.

[57:22] Cameron McEwen: He's looking at them as having the same sorts of intelligible structures that everything else does,

[57:31] Cameron McEwen: but put together in a slightly different way.

[57:35] Cameron McEwen: And maybe that's important for something that we need.

[57:40] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[57:41] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[57:41] Cameron McEwen: Like treating cancer or something,

[57:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[57:43] Bob Dobbs: Did you ever see his statement on cancer,

[57:46] Bob Dobbs: treating cancer?

[57:48] Cameron McEwen: About apricot tits,

[57:49] Cameron McEwen: you mean?

[57:50] Bob Dobbs: No,

[57:51] Bob Dobbs: no.

[57:52] Bob Dobbs: He makes a statement about cancer about 1974,

[57:57] Bob Dobbs: 75 in a obscure newspaper.

[58:00] Bob Dobbs: He says cancer is a lifestyle.

[58:03] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[58:03] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[58:04] Cameron McEwen: I've seen that.

[58:04] Bob Dobbs: You've seen that.

[58:05] Cameron McEwen: That's important.

[58:06] Cameron McEwen: That's important.

[58:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[58:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[58:09] Cameron McEwen: You can keep developing that if you want for the recording.

[58:13] Cameron McEwen: But just because I happen to have seen it doesn't mean that other people need to be deprived of your wisdom.

[58:19] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[58:21] Bob Dobbs: So cancer is a lifestyle,

[58:23] Bob Dobbs: a great succinct statement of what people were starting to realize in the

[58:27] Bob Dobbs: 70s in the cancer research.

[58:30] Bob Dobbs: And it goes back to Hans Steliay.

[58:32] Bob Dobbs: Hans Steliay is the stress of life,

[58:34] Bob Dobbs: which is really important for McLuhan.

[58:37] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[58:39] Bob Dobbs: I think one of the things we talked about that didn't get on the recording was his discovery of the role of numbness,

[58:48] Bob Dobbs: the numbing factor of technology.

[58:50] Bob Dobbs: He says,

[58:52] Bob Dobbs: we all know or advanced perceivers recognize that media are extensions of our body,

[58:59] Bob Dobbs: but we don't know why people ignore the effects of technology in the present.

[59:04] Bob Dobbs: And he says,

[59:05] Bob Dobbs: this is my discovery.

[59:06] Bob Dobbs: It says it's in page six of Understanding Media that I figured out it's the numbing factor.

[59:13] Bob Dobbs: And so I guess that's Thomas Aquinas'

[59:15] Bob Dobbs: sensory knowledge added to

[59:20] Bob Dobbs: Henselier. Henselier is very important to McLuhan and the stress of life.

[59:25] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[59:25] Bob Dobbs: the stress of life becomes new media anti-environment,

[59:30] Bob Dobbs: and therefore diseases happen in new media anti-environment.

[59:34] Bob Dobbs: And...

[59:35] Bob Dobbs: He had a disease every time there was a new technology that came along from the 40s with television.

[59:42] Bob Dobbs: And so cancer is a lifestyle.

[59:45] Bob Dobbs: He is being a doctor.

[59:47] Bob Dobbs: saying media ecology is what medicine needs to consider.

[59:51] Bob Dobbs: We need to have television turned off six months of the year because the decibels are too high,

[59:57] Bob Dobbs: causes too much stress,

[59:59] Bob Dobbs: and that would lead to cancer.

[1:00:02] Bob Dobbs: So this is important.

[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:00:06] Cameron McEwen: but it's one of the problems in McLuhan,

[1:00:08] Cameron McEwen: and that is that if we just think about chemistry for a minute,

[1:00:13] Cameron McEwen: imagine Priestley and Lavoisier around...

[1:00:16] Cameron McEwen: 1800 or 1790,

[1:00:19] Cameron McEwen: they're beginning to intuit that oxygen is something to be differentiated from phlogiston.

[1:00:31] Cameron McEwen: And they're beginning to see that there may be a way of defining the chemical element.

[1:00:38] Cameron McEwen: And we can imagine they might be tempted to look into the future and begin to say something like,

[1:00:44] Cameron McEwen: um,

[1:00:46] Cameron McEwen: Wow.

[1:00:47] Cameron McEwen: Imagine if we could get all of these definitions and what it would be like around 1850,

[1:00:53] Cameron McEwen: 50 years from now and all that sort of stuff.

[1:00:56] Cameron McEwen: So to compare,

[1:00:59] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan often goes off into the future about changing the temperature of countries and doing this and that.

[1:01:07] Cameron McEwen: And it's a kind of wild science fiction.

[1:01:13] Cameron McEwen: It's something that...

[1:01:16] Cameron McEwen: he shouldn't have done in the sense of communication because it it knocks people away from the really good stuff he was doing to the stuff that he was kind

[1:01:31] Cameron McEwen: of seeing through second sight but not seeing very well yes that's a good Yeah,

[1:01:41] Cameron McEwen: so there's a very big difference.

[1:01:45] Cameron McEwen: between how you apply science depending upon the stage it's at.

[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:01:51] Bob Dobbs: he makes that great science.

[1:01:52] Bob Dobbs: Mysticism is tomorrow's science,

[1:01:54] Bob Dobbs: dreamed today.

[1:01:55] Bob Dobbs: I think that's in Playboy magazine.

[1:01:57] Bob Dobbs: That's a really great statement.

[1:01:59] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:02:01] Bob Dobbs: He may have been confused,

[1:02:03] Bob Dobbs: but he was ahead of people because that's where science is going.

[1:02:07] Bob Dobbs: There's so much studying of the paranormal and all that stuff now.

[1:02:12] Bob Dobbs: They go into the taboo mystical areas.

[1:02:15] Bob Dobbs: So McLuhan was maybe a father of that.

[1:02:21] Cameron McEwen: At least,

[1:02:26] Cameron McEwen: I don't like to talk about father this and that,

[1:02:28] Cameron McEwen: simply because the origin of things is always very obscure.

[1:02:35] Cameron McEwen: So he was at least somebody who gave thought.

[1:02:41] Cameron McEwen: to and made contributions to this sort of subject area.

[1:02:46] Cameron McEwen: But this gets back,

[1:02:47] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:02:48] Cameron McEwen: to the two sentences I was reading out of

[1:02:53] Cameron McEwen: Garbage Apocalypse,

[1:02:56] Cameron McEwen: where what I wanted to do is I wanted to talk about what McLuhan could and could not see.

[1:03:03] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:03:03] Cameron McEwen: Because this also relates to numbness,

[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:07] Cameron McEwen: Because I think numbness in

[1:03:10] Cameron McEwen: 1964...

[1:03:11] Cameron McEwen: is not only a description of what he's talking about in 1964,

[1:03:17] Cameron McEwen: it's also a way of looking ahead to what he will see around 1970 having to do with gaps and resonance and nullity.

[1:03:28] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:03:28] Cameron McEwen: So when he says that when you were at a loss for words,

[1:03:34] Cameron McEwen: you tend to resort to gestures,

[1:03:36] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:36] Cameron McEwen: And that you turns out to be McLuhan.

[1:03:40] Cameron McEwen: But he doesn't know that,

[1:03:42] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:03:43] Cameron McEwen: And he doesn't know the circumstances of,

[1:03:49] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:03:50] Cameron McEwen: what will arise.

[1:03:51] Cameron McEwen: And he doesn't know the causes.

[1:03:54] Cameron McEwen: What he's saying here is he's looking into the future and he's sort of groping around like the famous blind people that McLuhan was always talking about.

[1:04:06] Cameron McEwen: And by the way,

[1:04:06] Cameron McEwen: so does Samuel Beckett all the time.

[1:04:10] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:04:11] Cameron McEwen: So well,

[1:04:12] Bob Dobbs: that maybe gets into Joyce's influence since he was going blind.

[1:04:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:04:17] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:04:18] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:04:19] Cameron McEwen: So here's and

[1:04:22] Cameron McEwen: Joyce would know an awful lot about tactility just on account of his bad eyes.

[1:04:30] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:04:31] Bob Dobbs: here's a side thing.

[1:04:32] Bob Dobbs: You know that Joyce went to mediums a lot.

[1:04:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:04:35] Cameron McEwen: it wouldn't surprise me.

[1:04:37] Cameron McEwen: Wouldn't surprise me.

[1:04:38] Cameron McEwen: But remember what I was saying before.

[1:04:39] Cameron McEwen: before.

[1:04:40] Cameron McEwen: about the difference between somebody who goes to a medium because they're ensconced in the gutenberg galaxy and they think oh here's a medium they they deal with life and death they deal with communication all that sort of stuff that's completely different from somebody that's in the marconi era

[1:05:00] Cameron McEwen: and they're looking into media as something that's inconceivable to somebody in the gutenberg era yes

[1:05:10] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:05:11] Cameron McEwen: So those are a different thing.

[1:05:12] Cameron McEwen: But here's McLuhan talking about himself,

[1:05:16] Cameron McEwen: but he doesn't know that he's talking about himself.

[1:05:19] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:05:19] Cameron McEwen: So the question of the who in second sight,

[1:05:23] Cameron McEwen: the who this concerns,

[1:05:25] Cameron McEwen: that's always unknown.

[1:05:28] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:05:29] Cameron McEwen: And when?

[1:05:30] Cameron McEwen: That's another unknown.

[1:05:31] Cameron McEwen: And where?

[1:05:32] Cameron McEwen: That's another unknown.

[1:05:35] Bob Dobbs: They're called the six degrees of separation.

[1:05:37] Bob Dobbs: Who,

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: what,

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: when,

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: where,

[1:05:38] Bob Dobbs: why,

[1:05:39] Bob Dobbs: and how.

[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:05:41] Cameron McEwen: Visual space.

[1:05:43] Cameron McEwen: And you can say,

[1:05:44] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:05:44] Cameron McEwen: but what's interesting here is you can say that in acoustic space or in future space,

[1:05:53] Cameron McEwen: those questions also apply,

[1:05:55] Cameron McEwen: but they apply as blanks.

[1:05:58] Bob Dobbs: As what?

[1:05:59] Bob Dobbs: As blank,

[1:05:59] Bob Dobbs: did you say?

[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: Blanks,

[1:06:01] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:06:02] Cameron McEwen: as gaps.

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:06:03] Bob Dobbs: yeah.

[1:06:03] Cameron McEwen: As unknowns.

[1:06:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:06:05] Cameron McEwen: So who says this stuff?

[1:06:07] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't know who,

[1:06:08] Cameron McEwen: he doesn't know when,

[1:06:09] Cameron McEwen: he doesn't know where.

[1:06:11] Bob Dobbs: He doesn't know how,

[1:06:12] Bob Dobbs: or what,

[1:06:13] Bob Dobbs: or why.

[1:06:14] Cameron McEwen: Exactly,

[1:06:15] Cameron McEwen: exactly.

[1:06:16] Cameron McEwen: So if we want to understand...

[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:06:19] Bob Dobbs: maybe that's what he was getting at when he says,

[1:06:22] Bob Dobbs: I don't know what the difference is between medium and message.

[1:06:25] Bob Dobbs: That's another part of that second sight area.

[1:06:29] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:06:30] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely correct.

[1:06:32] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:06:33] Bob Dobbs: so what were you going to say?

[1:06:35] Bob Dobbs: I think he was...

[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:06:35] Cameron McEwen: I mean...

[1:06:37] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[1:06:37] Cameron McEwen: what we're talking about here is how McLuhan needs to be read,

[1:06:43] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:06:44] Cameron McEwen: How are we to understand?

[1:06:45] Cameron McEwen: Or sometimes we have tapes or something so we can hear.

[1:06:49] Cameron McEwen: But how is he to be understood when we read him,

[1:06:55] Cameron McEwen: when we hear him?

[1:06:56] Cameron McEwen: And what you and I are talking about here is that this kind of understanding is very,

[1:07:02] Cameron McEwen: very complex.

[1:07:04] Cameron McEwen: because

[1:07:05] Cameron McEwen: in order really to do it,

[1:07:07] Cameron McEwen: you need to exercise a little bit of second sight yourself.

[1:07:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:07:12] Cameron McEwen: And if you can't do that,

[1:07:14] Cameron McEwen: then you need to back up a little ways and say,

[1:07:17] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:07:18] Cameron McEwen: before I look into what McLuhan is writing or saying,

[1:07:22] Cameron McEwen: I better try to figure out how you look into the future a bit,

[1:07:27] Cameron McEwen: because looking into the future a bit concerns how

[1:07:32] Cameron McEwen: I, in the next five minutes.

[1:07:34] Cameron McEwen: I'm going to try to understand McLuhan.

[1:07:36] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:07:36] Cameron McEwen: There's a necessary opacity there,

[1:07:39] Cameron McEwen: both between what I'm doing now and what I will be doing in five minutes,

[1:07:44] Cameron McEwen: but also to the perception I have of McLuhan if I ever have one.

[1:07:53] Bob Dobbs: You blipped out.

[1:07:55] Cameron McEwen: No?

[1:07:55] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:07:56] Cameron McEwen: after what?

[1:07:57] Bob Dobbs: If you ever have...

[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:07:59] Cameron McEwen: had what?

[1:08:00] Cameron McEwen: Had a perception.

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:08:01] Bob Dobbs: say that sentence again,

[1:08:02] Bob Dobbs: that last...

[1:08:03] Bob Dobbs: statement or question?

[1:08:05] Cameron McEwen: I'm saying that there's an opacity,

[1:08:08] Cameron McEwen: a gap,

[1:08:09] Cameron McEwen: something that cannot be seen between where I am now and where I need to be to understand McLuhan,

[1:08:16] Cameron McEwen: either through reading or hearing.

[1:08:19] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:08:19] Cameron McEwen: And there's not only this gap in me,

[1:08:24] Cameron McEwen: there's also a gap in what I'm going to see if I succeed in seeing it.

[1:08:32] Bob Dobbs: There's going to be a gap in what you see if you succeed in seeing.

[1:08:37] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[1:08:37] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:08:39] Bob Dobbs: Do you know that?

[1:08:40] Cameron McEwen: That's what second sight involves.

[1:08:43] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:08:43] Cameron McEwen: Second sight involves seeing,

[1:08:45] Cameron McEwen: and we just were talking about how there are this series of unknowns to second sight.

[1:08:55] Bob Dobbs: You have to make a shift in your perception.

[1:08:58] Bob Dobbs: You make a trick of your mind to allow yourself to know it.

[1:09:02] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:09:03] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:09:04] Cameron McEwen: But you see,

[1:09:06] Cameron McEwen: that's a very important topic in your book.

[1:09:08] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:09:10] Cameron McEwen: When you say you have to make a trick of your mind,

[1:09:14] Cameron McEwen: what you and your means there is not you and me,

[1:09:20] Cameron McEwen: Bob.

[1:09:20] Cameron McEwen: It's something very different from that.

[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:09:22] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:09:23] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:09:24] Bob Dobbs: And so he,

[1:09:26] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:09:27] Bob Dobbs: he,

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: when he reads,

[1:09:28] Bob Dobbs: when he reviews Julian James's book,

[1:09:31] Bob Dobbs: He's just pointing out what James misses,

[1:09:35] Bob Dobbs: the formal causality of the phonetic alphabet.

[1:09:40] Bob Dobbs: I think Marshall was fascinated with that phenomenon that

[1:09:45] Bob Dobbs: James was saying people naturally experience before visual space.

[1:09:49] Bob Dobbs: They were perceiving all kinds of crazy resonances,

[1:09:53] Bob Dobbs: and there was no framework for it.

[1:09:54] Bob Dobbs: And he saw that's what we're heading into again.

[1:09:58] Bob Dobbs: Correct.

[1:10:01] Cameron McEwen: That's exactly what the passage concerns from Garbage Apocalypse that you quote at some length.

[1:10:09] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:10:10] Cameron McEwen: On 72,

[1:10:10] Cameron McEwen: 74.

[1:10:12] Bob Dobbs: When he's there talking to these art critics who are very conceptual,

[1:10:16] Bob Dobbs: or even,

[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:10:17] Bob Dobbs: there's the movement of conceptual art at that point,

[1:10:20] Bob Dobbs: he's telling them that anything you come up with called concepts is not going to be appropriate.

[1:10:26] Bob Dobbs: It's so blatant what he says in that.

[1:10:28] Bob Dobbs: More blatant than anywhere else about percepts over concepts in that statement.

[1:10:35] Bob Dobbs: It sounds like he's crazy to those guys.

[1:10:37] Bob Dobbs: They value concepts.

[1:10:39] Bob Dobbs: And they're Gutenbergs,

[1:10:41] Bob Dobbs: but he's blatantly saying that you've got to realize there's something in communication that involves post-concept situation,

[1:10:51] Bob Dobbs: which is,

[1:10:51] Bob Dobbs: you're right,

[1:10:52] Bob Dobbs: second sight.

[1:10:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:10:55] Bob Dobbs: Second sight dimension.

[1:10:56] Cameron McEwen: Actually,

[1:10:57] Cameron McEwen: that's a whole new meaning of second sight.

[1:11:00] Cameron McEwen: So thank you very much for prompting that.

[1:11:03] Cameron McEwen: You see,

[1:11:04] Cameron McEwen: let's take a primitive hunter.

[1:11:08] Cameron McEwen: They're going around and they're looking at footprints of some animal and they're trying to track that animal.

[1:11:16] Cameron McEwen: They're trying to figure out how fresh are these prints and how big is the animal and how fast was it traveling and all of these sorts of questions that are imperative for the hunter to understand,

[1:11:29] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:11:29] Cameron McEwen: And

[1:11:30] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan idea is that that hunter does not work by concept.

[1:11:37] Cameron McEwen: He doesn't say,

[1:11:39] Cameron McEwen: he doesn't try to say,

[1:11:40] Cameron McEwen: well,

[1:11:41] Cameron McEwen: I know that animals of such and such a weight impress the dirt here by such and such a number of centimeters or something like that,

[1:11:55] Cameron McEwen: and on and on.

[1:11:57] Cameron McEwen: Instead,

[1:11:58] Cameron McEwen: what the hunter does is he uses percepts,

[1:12:02] Cameron McEwen: and most people completely misunderstand

[1:12:05] Cameron McEwen: Perseps and McLuhan.

[1:12:07] Cameron McEwen: Percepts aren't something that we do.

[1:12:09] Cameron McEwen: It's not something that's sort of ahead of concepts in point of time or something like that.

[1:12:18] Cameron McEwen: Percepts are what people have already seen.

[1:12:23] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:12:23] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:12:24] Cameron McEwen: And in fact includes maybe what they didn't already see,

[1:12:30] Cameron McEwen: but they could have seen.

[1:12:31] Cameron McEwen: And so the hunter,

[1:12:33] Cameron McEwen: when he's looking at these footprints,

[1:12:36] Cameron McEwen: he's...

[1:12:37] Cameron McEwen: he's flipping over in his mind all of the different ways in which this has been seen.

[1:12:45] Cameron McEwen: And that includes all of the different ways that those perceptions had following perceptions of what that meant.

[1:12:55] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:12:55] Cameron McEwen: And so that I think you call this a global theater.

[1:13:00] Cameron McEwen: the so-called primitive person is...

[1:13:05] Cameron McEwen: doing something that's very profound and he's doing something that is lost with the Euclid era and it's lost in some respects to our

[1:13:21] Cameron McEwen: great detriment because what that what that hunter is doing is for that hunter,

[1:13:28] Cameron McEwen: percepts are not his or not hers.

[1:13:33] Cameron McEwen: They are the

[1:13:34] Cameron McEwen: They are the common wealth,

[1:13:38] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:13:39] Cameron McEwen: of human beings.

[1:13:41] Bob Dobbs: The lingua franca?

[1:13:45] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:13:46] Cameron McEwen: They are the common heritage.

[1:13:50] Cameron McEwen: You could even say the common being of human beings.

[1:13:53] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:13:56] Cameron McEwen: The person is not attending to my focus or my knowledge of things.

[1:14:03] Cameron McEwen: That person,

[1:14:04] Cameron McEwen: that hunter,

[1:14:05] Cameron McEwen: is attending to all of the possible ways of seeing this and assessing this.

[1:14:13] Cameron McEwen: And none of those belong to me.

[1:14:16] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:14:16] Bob Dobbs: that's the medium.

[1:14:17] Bob Dobbs: That's a definition of the medium,

[1:14:19] Bob Dobbs: an aspect.

[1:14:20] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:14:20] Cameron McEwen: one of the definitions.

[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[1:14:22] Bob Dobbs: let me say a few things before I forget them.

[1:14:25] Bob Dobbs: I get what you're saying.

[1:14:26] Bob Dobbs: I want to point out,

[1:14:27] Bob Dobbs: we forgot to mention...

[1:14:29] Bob Dobbs: Maybe he got his first inklings of this when Carpenter reported to him his Eskimo experiences,

[1:14:36] Bob Dobbs: or what we call Inuit.

[1:14:36] Cameron McEwen: I'm not sure.

[1:14:38] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:14:38] Cameron McEwen: look at his thesis.

[1:14:40] Cameron McEwen: 19,

[1:14:42] Cameron McEwen: it was published,

[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:14:43] Cameron McEwen: it was accepted,

[1:14:45] Cameron McEwen: it was submitted and accepted in 1943.

[1:14:48] Cameron McEwen: It was written in

[1:14:51] Cameron McEwen: 1941-42. There you have the three trivial arts,

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:14:58] Cameron McEwen: Those arts,

[1:14:59] Cameron McEwen: according to McLuhan,

[1:15:01] Cameron McEwen: are ways of relating to the world.

[1:15:05] Cameron McEwen: They are already media,

[1:15:07] Cameron McEwen: but the thing that...

[1:15:10] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan had in his mind from his University of Manitoba days was that in a book like Science in the Modern World by Whitehead that he studied very carefully,

[1:15:25] Cameron McEwen: if you go through Science in the Modern World,

[1:15:28] Cameron McEwen: you find that he refers to media-like things on almost every page.

[1:15:34] Cameron McEwen: But when he refers to them,

[1:15:36] Cameron McEwen: they're always named differently.

[1:15:39] Cameron McEwen: And they always have different specifications.

[1:15:42] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes they're mental.

[1:15:43] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes they're physical.

[1:15:44] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes they belong to an individual.

[1:15:46] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes they belong to a society.

[1:15:49] Cameron McEwen: Sometimes they belong to a civilization.

[1:15:52] Cameron McEwen: On and on and on like this.

[1:15:54] Cameron McEwen: So McLuhan didn't know in 1930,

[1:15:57] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:15:57] Cameron McEwen: when he first read

[1:15:59] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead, that this was a problem.

[1:16:03] Cameron McEwen: But over the next 20 years,

[1:16:07] Cameron McEwen: next.

[1:16:08] Cameron McEwen: 30 years,

[1:16:09] Cameron McEwen: I should say,

[1:16:10] Cameron McEwen: it gradually develops in his mind that the whole question of media is self-referential.

[1:16:20] Cameron McEwen: Unless you've got your media right,

[1:16:22] Cameron McEwen: you're never going to get your media right.

[1:16:25] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:16:26] Bob Dobbs: now let me add this.

[1:16:27] Bob Dobbs: Remember he quoted somebody who said,

[1:16:32] Bob Dobbs: poetry communicates before understanding.

[1:16:34] Bob Dobbs: He liked that statement.

[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:16:35] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:16:36] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:16:36] Cameron McEwen: I've got a lot.

[1:16:38] Cameron McEwen: You and I conversed about this in email some years ago,

[1:16:42] Cameron McEwen: and I have a post about it.

[1:16:46] Cameron McEwen: And in fact,

[1:16:47] Cameron McEwen: he says in four or five different places,

[1:16:52] Cameron McEwen: usually referring back to

[1:16:55] Cameron McEwen: Elliot, who made that comment sometime in the

[1:16:59] Cameron McEwen: 20s.

[1:17:00] Cameron McEwen: Right. Or maybe it was 1919 that was in the Dante essay.

[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:17:05] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:17:06] Bob Dobbs: see...

[1:17:07] Bob Dobbs: In my chart,

[1:17:09] Bob Dobbs: I consider the five levels as five kinds of 20th century tactility or ESP,

[1:17:15] Bob Dobbs: but a new kind of multimedia ESP.

[1:17:19] Bob Dobbs: And as you have been talking,

[1:17:21] Bob Dobbs: I'm thinking when I said there's the mental,

[1:17:25] Bob Dobbs: the mental level of elements,

[1:17:28] Bob Dobbs: which are media,

[1:17:29] Bob Dobbs: and the fact that in 53,

[1:17:31] Bob Dobbs: Crick and Watson discovered the particular...

[1:17:35] Bob Dobbs: parts of the genes,

[1:17:36] Bob Dobbs: and McLuhan discovered the Mimic code.

[1:17:39] Bob Dobbs: The Mimic would be later

[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: Dawkins' word,

[1:17:41] Bob Dobbs: meme.

[1:17:42] Bob Dobbs: But this ESP that people have on the perceptual level of their society and the anti-environment influence on that,

[1:17:50] Bob Dobbs: and maybe the conditioning of it,

[1:17:52] Bob Dobbs: is what we're getting at.

[1:17:53] Bob Dobbs: We're getting at an aspect of the meaning of medium.

[1:17:56] Bob Dobbs: It's the collective ESP.

[1:17:58] Bob Dobbs: And we ended talking last time,

[1:18:00] Bob Dobbs: but why did

[1:18:03] Bob Dobbs: One culture dressed one way and another culture dressed another way.

[1:18:07] Bob Dobbs: You could say it's the weather or different aspects of the physical environment,

[1:18:10] Bob Dobbs: but they're also the effect of the language.

[1:18:12] Bob Dobbs: And language is an active ESP.

[1:18:15] Bob Dobbs: And look at the tetrad for verbum,

[1:18:18] Bob Dobbs: V-E-R-B-U-M,

[1:18:19] Bob Dobbs: that McLuhan presents,

[1:18:21] Bob Dobbs: I think,

[1:18:21] Bob Dobbs: in Etcetera magazine.

[1:18:23] Bob Dobbs: It's one of my favorite tetrads.

[1:18:25] Bob Dobbs: Do you recall that?

[1:18:26] Cameron McEwen: I have.

[1:18:29] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:18:30] Cameron McEwen: You quote that,

[1:18:31] Cameron McEwen: maybe even in this.

[1:18:32] Cameron McEwen: book.

[1:18:33] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:18:33] Cameron McEwen: that's right.

[1:18:33] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:18:34] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:18:35] Bob Dobbs: We look at there.

[1:18:37] Bob Dobbs: But you see that this awareness of the medium that Lewis gets into is a product of the telephone and the radio in the

[1:18:50] Bob Dobbs: 20s. The medium is the message.

[1:18:52] Bob Dobbs: It dawns on these people,

[1:18:54] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:18:55] Bob Dobbs: in a very innocent way.

[1:18:57] Bob Dobbs: And then McLuhan develops it and applies it.

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: Sure.

[1:19:00] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:19:01] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says that.

[1:19:02] Cameron McEwen: write out many times that it's the development of new media almost simultaneously.

[1:19:12] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:19:12] Cameron McEwen: if you look at world history,

[1:19:15] Cameron McEwen: the number of media that were developed after 1880 or something like this is more than the number that were developed for hundreds of thousands of years.

[1:19:26] Cameron McEwen: And this onslaught of media is one of the things that...

[1:19:33] Cameron McEwen: makes people look into the question and in fact which enables an answer to it.

[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:19:39] Bob Dobbs: so McLuhan once said that there was more invention in the 19th century than in the 20th.

[1:19:44] Bob Dobbs: But let's see,

[1:19:45] Bob Dobbs: that may mean hardware invention.

[1:19:48] Bob Dobbs: Once you get into the radio shock,

[1:19:49] Bob Dobbs: and he said radio jumped evolution a million years.

[1:19:54] Bob Dobbs: We evolved a million years when we started to experience radio compared to society before.

[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:20:00] Bob Dobbs: then we end up resonating in the electric sphere of radio movies and computers.

[1:20:06] Bob Dobbs: And you get into the global theater and then the global membrane,

[1:20:09] Bob Dobbs: and then later other things.

[1:20:12] Bob Dobbs: But this resonating would mean no more hardware inventions,

[1:20:15] Bob Dobbs: but what you have is enhancement of the ESP quality that you're trying to describe,

[1:20:21] Bob Dobbs: that he had as second sight personally,

[1:20:25] Bob Dobbs: but it opened him to a kind of communication between people through gesture that media extended.

[1:20:33] Bob Dobbs: And that's why he says electronics as ESP.

[1:20:36] Bob Dobbs: He's analyzing ESP.

[1:20:38] Bob Dobbs: And he makes fun of one of the famous psychics in his

[1:20:44] Bob Dobbs: 50s articles and explorations,

[1:20:46] Bob Dobbs: whatever.

[1:20:47] Bob Dobbs: He was tuned into a world that people,

[1:20:51] Bob Dobbs: regular scholars,

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: literate guys,

[1:20:52] Bob Dobbs: Gubberg-Gaussi people would not look into,

[1:20:56] Bob Dobbs: would not even acknowledge.

[1:20:58] Bob Dobbs: Do you know who I mean?

[1:20:59] Bob Dobbs: He mentions the fad.

[1:21:01] Bob Dobbs: Maybe it's some psychic who talked about reincarnation or something in past lives in one of his mid-50s essays.

[1:21:07] Bob Dobbs: He just drops their name in.

[1:21:10] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:21:10] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:21:10] Cameron McEwen: I think that was common with him.

[1:21:12] Cameron McEwen: But you have to understand,

[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:21:13] Cameron McEwen: that what you're talking about here is the essence of McLuhan.

[1:21:17] Cameron McEwen: And,

[1:21:18] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:21:18] Cameron McEwen: when he says baseball is culture or ads or art or comics are going to be the new form of books and all this stuff,

[1:21:28] Cameron McEwen: this is similar to what you're saying.

[1:21:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:21:31] Cameron McEwen: He believed that any kind,

[1:21:35] Cameron McEwen: as he said already in the,

[1:21:36] Cameron McEwen: excuse me,

[1:21:37] Cameron McEwen: 1944 article on

[1:21:41] Cameron McEwen: Richards and Leavis,

[1:21:43] Cameron McEwen: excuse me,

[1:21:47] Cameron McEwen: if a cogent literary theory has to be,

[1:21:53] Cameron McEwen: what does he say?

[1:21:55] Cameron McEwen: I want to use the word pleroma,

[1:21:57] Cameron McEwen: but that's probably not correct.

[1:21:59] Cameron McEwen: But he ends that essay.

[1:22:01] Cameron McEwen: by saying more or less that our theory needs to be complete.

[1:22:07] Cameron McEwen: We can't have a theory that applies to,

[1:22:10] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:22:11] Cameron McEwen: books,

[1:22:12] Cameron McEwen: but doesn't apply to film.

[1:22:15] Cameron McEwen: Or it applies to books,

[1:22:16] Cameron McEwen: but not to comics.

[1:22:17] Cameron McEwen: Or it applies to books,

[1:22:19] Cameron McEwen: but not to ads.

[1:22:21] Cameron McEwen: And so he was already very conscious of the need for a comprehensive theory in the

[1:22:28] Cameron McEwen: 1940s from having worked with these people.

[1:22:30] Cameron McEwen: people in the

[1:22:31] Bob Dobbs: 1930s. Yeah.

[1:22:32] Bob Dobbs: And what are their names?

[1:22:33] Bob Dobbs: Lodge and Rupert?

[1:22:36] Bob Dobbs: What are the...

[1:22:37] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:22:39] Cameron McEwen: Meritane.

[1:22:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:22:42] Cameron McEwen: Lodge and Wright,

[1:22:43] Cameron McEwen: with a W,

[1:22:45] Cameron McEwen: were the two professors that were very influential on McLuhan around 1930 at the University of Manitoba.

[1:22:53] Cameron McEwen: But what I was thinking about in terms of Levis and Richards is that he had actually been working with them

[1:23:00] Cameron McEwen: physically in the middle

[1:23:02] Cameron McEwen: 30s.

[1:23:03] Cameron McEwen: He was in several courses with

[1:23:06] Cameron McEwen: Richards, and he was practically married to

[1:23:12] Cameron McEwen: Leavis' journal,

[1:23:13] Cameron McEwen: Scrutiny.

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:23:18] Bob Dobbs: what's interesting,

[1:23:19] Bob Dobbs: all the modernists,

[1:23:21] Bob Dobbs: Eliot,

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: Lewis,

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: Pound,

[1:23:23] Bob Dobbs: they all hung out with the Theosophists at some point in the

[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: 19-aughts.

[1:23:28] Bob Dobbs: 1908,

[1:23:29] Bob Dobbs: 9,

[1:23:29] Bob Dobbs: 10,

[1:23:29] Bob Dobbs: 11 that scene so they're well acquainted with that and then McLuhan is living with a man his father who's fascinated with the Rosie Crucian stuff so the talk of this stuff that

[1:23:44] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if it's a minority topic but probably it was he had it in his house and I don't know was his mother

[1:23:56] Bob Dobbs: Psychically channeling these things she'd perform?

[1:24:00] Bob Dobbs: Was she having some ability that made her quite a good,

[1:24:03] Bob Dobbs: what do they call her,

[1:24:04] Bob Dobbs: an elocutionist?

[1:24:06] Bob Dobbs: So he lived in a very charged house on these levels.

[1:24:09] Bob Dobbs: That's right,

[1:24:11] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:24:11] Cameron McEwen: But you see,

[1:24:13] Cameron McEwen: once you think of his mother,

[1:24:15] Cameron McEwen: then you see that a lot of the definitions of these things needs to be enriched,

[1:24:23] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:24:23] Cameron McEwen: Most people think of...

[1:24:25] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:24:25] Cameron McEwen: channeling as something that a few exceptional individuals somehow reach across time and channel some other individual,

[1:24:35] Cameron McEwen: all that sort of stuff.

[1:24:37] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:24:38] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan mother as a reader.

[1:24:42] Cameron McEwen: had a business of channeling,

[1:24:44] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:24:44] Cameron McEwen: And she was constantly,

[1:24:45] Cameron McEwen: as she was cleaning the house,

[1:24:49] Cameron McEwen: she was constantly murmuring to herself.

[1:24:53] Cameron McEwen: Really,

[1:24:53] Cameron McEwen: the house was full of murmurs of

[1:24:56] Cameron McEwen: English literary history.

[1:24:58] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:24:59] Bob Dobbs: That's why he knew so many poems.

[1:25:01] Cameron McEwen: He lived in that.

[1:25:02] Bob Dobbs: He knew poems by the time he got to university that the other professors didn't know.

[1:25:06] Bob Dobbs: He had a good dousing of it.

[1:25:09] Bob Dobbs: You've been dunked in it,

[1:25:10] Bob Dobbs: royally dunked in it.

[1:25:12] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:25:13] Bob Dobbs: I wonder,

[1:25:14] Bob Dobbs: would the ESP side over into the quadrivium,

[1:25:21] Bob Dobbs: geometry,

[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: arithmetic,

[1:25:22] Bob Dobbs: and astronomy?

[1:25:23] Bob Dobbs: Would that be a more psychic side or second-sight side than the trivium?

[1:25:34] Cameron McEwen: I don't know how to answer that.

[1:25:38] Cameron McEwen: I think that the second site would enter into all of them in a certain way.

[1:25:43] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:25:46] Cameron McEwen: I think,

[1:25:47] Cameron McEwen: again,

[1:25:48] Cameron McEwen: some of this is in your book.

[1:25:49] Bob Dobbs: That's right.

[1:25:50] Cameron McEwen: And we will definitely get to it.

[1:25:52] Cameron McEwen: But the whole topic of McLuhan and music is a very rich one.

[1:25:59] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:26:00] Cameron McEwen: One of the things that I think we talked about last time but didn't get recorded is the fact that

[1:26:07] Cameron McEwen: the

[1:26:08] Cameron McEwen: Muller teams were a very musical couple.

[1:26:13] Cameron McEwen: Bernard

[1:26:14] Cameron McEwen: Muller team was an accomplished violinist.

[1:26:17] Cameron McEwen: His wife was near professional pianist.

[1:26:21] Cameron McEwen: Her father was the conductor of the Kansas City

[1:26:24] Cameron McEwen: Symphony Orchestra.

[1:26:26] Cameron McEwen: So when McLuhan comes to write to marry

[1:26:32] Cameron McEwen: Muller team as

[1:26:35] Cameron McEwen: Bernie was dying in 1970.

[1:26:38] Cameron McEwen: what he mentions with Corinne is being immersed in that musical household and learning about modern

[1:26:53] Cameron McEwen: trends in music.

[1:26:56] Bob Dobbs: He's saying that that's their experience with the Mullertims?

[1:27:01] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:27:02] Bob Dobbs: I see.

[1:27:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:27:03] Cameron McEwen: And then if you go back...

[1:27:06] Cameron McEwen: Five or seven years before that,

[1:27:09] Cameron McEwen: in his letters home from Cambridge,

[1:27:11] Cameron McEwen: he frequently mentions going to a friend's house to hear a symphony or some music or something.

[1:27:21] Cameron McEwen: So it was part of McLuhan culture.

[1:27:25] Cameron McEwen: I don't know if it began already in Winnipeg or not,

[1:27:28] Cameron McEwen: but certainly by the time of Cambridge,

[1:27:31] Cameron McEwen: he was...

[1:27:34] Cameron McEwen: tuned into the idea that music,

[1:27:38] Cameron McEwen: and especially modern music,

[1:27:40] Cameron McEwen: was an important component of education,

[1:27:45] Cameron McEwen: of being an educated person.

[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:27:48] Bob Dobbs: let me add this point.

[1:27:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:27:50] Bob Dobbs: so why do two musicians,

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: great musicians,

[1:27:52] Bob Dobbs: they're attracted to McLuhan.

[1:27:54] Bob Dobbs: They find he knows how to talk their language or translate their experience.

[1:27:59] Bob Dobbs: His vocabulary is useful.

[1:28:01] Bob Dobbs: That's Glenn Gould and Duke Ellington.

[1:28:04] Bob Dobbs: They both wanted to hang out with McLuhan.

[1:28:07] Bob Dobbs: Ellington used to visit the Coach House.

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: See?

[1:28:11] Bob Dobbs: So why would a great musician want to talk to apparently a literate guy?

[1:28:16] Bob Dobbs: But McLuhan was beyond the literate,

[1:28:18] Bob Dobbs: and he's exactly what you're saying.

[1:28:22] Bob Dobbs: He knew what music was communicating in some way.

[1:28:25] Cameron McEwen: And that relates to everything we've been talking about because...

[1:28:31] Cameron McEwen: for

[1:28:32] Cameron McEwen: Gould and for the Duke,

[1:28:35] Cameron McEwen: if you didn't understand gaps and silence and changes of chords and all of this sort of stuff,

[1:28:47] Cameron McEwen: then you really didn't understand music.

[1:28:50] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:28:51] Cameron McEwen: So later on,

[1:28:52] Cameron McEwen: when

[1:28:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan and John Cage start talking,

[1:28:56] Cameron McEwen: Cage right away thinks that...

[1:28:59] Cameron McEwen: Wow,

[1:28:59] Cameron McEwen: this guy is talking about what I'm trying to talk about,

[1:29:02] Cameron McEwen: but he can do it better.

[1:29:05] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:29:06] Bob Dobbs: and so

[1:29:08] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan, you know,

[1:29:09] Bob Dobbs: Cage's big book in the early 60s is Silence.

[1:29:13] Bob Dobbs: And Marsh makes a lot out of that word.

[1:29:15] Bob Dobbs: And he says it's the unintended sounds of anti-environment.

[1:29:20] Bob Dobbs: That's your acoustic ground there.

[1:29:22] Bob Dobbs: And it's not limited to music.

[1:29:24] Bob Dobbs: So Cage,

[1:29:25] Bob Dobbs: as a revolutionary musician,

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[1:29:27] Bob Dobbs: there's lots of books and essays on him,

[1:29:29] Bob Dobbs: and they know,

[1:29:30] Bob Dobbs: they write about his interest in McLuhan,

[1:29:32] Bob Dobbs: but they don't get that McLuhan was further along than Cage in understanding the dynamics of acoustic space in a new electrified anti-environment.

[1:29:45] Cameron McEwen: I agree,

[1:29:46] Cameron McEwen: except I hate to think in terms of further along.

[1:29:50] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:29:51] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[1:29:51] Cameron McEwen: that's continuity,

[1:29:53] Cameron McEwen: Gutenberg,

[1:29:54] Cameron McEwen: all that sort of stuff.

[1:29:55] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:29:56] Bob Dobbs: but the...

[1:29:58] Bob Dobbs: Bring it back to the nonlinear,

[1:30:01] Bob Dobbs: the expansion of tactility by the electric anti-environment is changing music,

[1:30:08] Bob Dobbs: and Cage knows that.

[1:30:10] Bob Dobbs: But Cage is a pedestrian compared to McLuhan.

[1:30:13] Bob Dobbs: And McLuhan comes up with really important insights like,

[1:30:17] Bob Dobbs: why is rock only enabled in English?

[1:30:23] Bob Dobbs: And he'd ask people,

[1:30:24] Bob Dobbs: and they'd go,

[1:30:24] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[1:30:25] Bob Dobbs: He'd go,

[1:30:27] Bob Dobbs: because it's measured in feet.

[1:30:29] Bob Dobbs: And they'd go,

[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: what?

[1:30:30] Bob Dobbs: He'd go,

[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:30:31] Bob Dobbs: I am a pentameter.

[1:30:33] Bob Dobbs: So there was the pun of dancing and feet in English that resonated with the rhythms of rock or pop music.

[1:30:41] Bob Dobbs: I mean,

[1:30:42] Bob Dobbs: nobody else came up with that idea.

[1:30:43] Bob Dobbs: It's a brilliant wrap-up of why

[1:30:46] Bob Dobbs: English dominates the musical world in the 50s and 60s and pop culture.

[1:30:51] Bob Dobbs: And then what happens,

[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: you get to rap,

[1:30:53] Bob Dobbs: and that's grunting.

[1:30:55] Bob Dobbs: That's the music of the verbum.

[1:31:01] Bob Dobbs: Follow me?

[1:31:03] Cameron McEwen: I follow.

[1:31:04] Cameron McEwen: I would tell a different story,

[1:31:06] Cameron McEwen: but that's all right.

[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:31:07] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: go,

[1:31:08] Bob Dobbs: okay.

[1:31:09] Bob Dobbs: You do your solo.

[1:31:10] Bob Dobbs: What's the different story?

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:31:15] Cameron McEwen: first off,

[1:31:16] Cameron McEwen: I don't think it's true that rock is only in English.

[1:31:21] Cameron McEwen: I don't think it's true that southern black dialect was responsible for jazz.

[1:31:32] Cameron McEwen: I think that...

[1:31:34] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:31:34] Bob Dobbs: that's what Marshall says.

[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:31:36] Bob Dobbs: it wasn't.

[1:31:36] Cameron McEwen: I know.

[1:31:37] Cameron McEwen: Of course he does.

[1:31:37] Cameron McEwen: Of course he does.

[1:31:38] Bob Dobbs: It was industry.

[1:31:40] Bob Dobbs: The black music did not come from Africa.

[1:31:43] Bob Dobbs: Try to tell that to a black person.

[1:31:45] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:31:47] Cameron McEwen: And it's a very questionable assertion.

[1:31:50] Cameron McEwen: But what I hear

[1:31:53] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan doing there is telling a story and wondering if the people to whom he's telling the story can can get a hook out of it.

[1:32:04] Cameron McEwen: Is this something that you can relate to?

[1:32:06] Cameron McEwen: And if you can relate to it,

[1:32:07] Cameron McEwen: then.

[1:32:08] Cameron McEwen: then really relate to it.

[1:32:10] Cameron McEwen: Go into it.

[1:32:11] Cameron McEwen: Try and think about it.

[1:32:12] Cameron McEwen: Try and understand what's there.

[1:32:16] Cameron McEwen: If you take it as a historical gambit,

[1:32:21] Cameron McEwen: then you're going to think it's nonsense and you may be right.

[1:32:24] Cameron McEwen: It's like saying to people,

[1:32:28] Cameron McEwen: now is the time of the end of the book.

[1:32:32] Cameron McEwen: And especially people in universities or in journalism went nuts.

[1:32:38] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:32:38] Cameron McEwen: And we're saying,

[1:32:39] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[1:32:39] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:32:39] Cameron McEwen: this is terrible and all that sort of stuff.

[1:32:41] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:32:42] Cameron McEwen: here we are 70 years later or something after he was saying it,

[1:32:46] Cameron McEwen: and it's so obvious what was going on,

[1:32:49] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:32:50] Cameron McEwen: So what he was talking about there wasn't a history or a historical fact or something like that.

[1:32:59] Cameron McEwen: It was an attempt to open a door,

[1:33:02] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:33:03] Cameron McEwen: Can you come through this door and understand what's going on.

[1:33:08] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[1:33:09] Cameron McEwen: in the garbage apocalypse essay that you point out in the book,

[1:33:15] Cameron McEwen: he starts going into the phrase,

[1:33:17] Cameron McEwen: where it's at.

[1:33:18] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:33:19] Cameron McEwen: And says,

[1:33:20] Cameron McEwen: it's very important to think about this,

[1:33:23] Cameron McEwen: because what do we mean by at?

[1:33:26] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:33:27] Cameron McEwen: It's a great question.

[1:33:28] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:33:29] Cameron McEwen: Great question.

[1:33:31] Bob Dobbs: But people say it as if they know it,

[1:33:34] Bob Dobbs: what it means,

[1:33:35] Bob Dobbs: as if it's appropriate.

[1:33:37] Cameron McEwen: They say before they understand.

[1:33:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:33:41] Cameron McEwen: You see,

[1:33:43] Cameron McEwen: if he's right about percept and concept,

[1:33:47] Cameron McEwen: and this is something that I think nearly all

[1:33:51] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan, quote-unquote,

[1:33:52] Cameron McEwen: scholars know nothing about,

[1:33:54] Cameron McEwen: if McLuhan is right about percepts and concepts,

[1:33:57] Cameron McEwen: we could never not use percepts.

[1:34:00] Cameron McEwen: It's just that we don't know that we're using them.

[1:34:03] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:34:04] Bob Dobbs: What,

[1:34:05] Bob Dobbs: did you know that the...

[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: R.

[1:34:08] Bob Dobbs: Buck,

[1:34:09] Bob Dobbs: a friend of

[1:34:10] Bob Dobbs: Walt Whitman,

[1:34:11] Bob Dobbs: who did the book Cosmic Consciousness,

[1:34:14] Bob Dobbs: which once I saw in a picture of McLuhan library.

[1:34:18] Bob Dobbs: You can see that book.

[1:34:19] Bob Dobbs: He's a Canadian.

[1:34:19] Cameron McEwen: He's a Canadian,

[1:34:20] Cameron McEwen: that guy.

[1:34:20] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:34:20] Bob Dobbs: right.

[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:34:22] Bob Dobbs: I think he used the word percept.

[1:34:25] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan made a statement that you can't find a definition of percept in

[1:34:32] Bob Dobbs: French or is it in English?

[1:34:33] Bob Dobbs: I can't remember how it goes.

[1:34:36] Bob Dobbs: There's no word for percept?

[1:34:38] Bob Dobbs: Before the word percept?

[1:34:40] Bob Dobbs: I don't know.

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: You don't know?

[1:34:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:34:43] Bob Dobbs: I might be mixing it up.

[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: But

[1:34:44] Cameron McEwen: I can tell you...

[1:34:47] Cameron McEwen: My research tells me on this.

[1:34:54] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan read

[1:34:57] Cameron McEwen: Science in the Modern World in around 1930 and I think he read it many times.

[1:35:07] Cameron McEwen: He has two copies in the library in Toronto and may have had more copies than that.

[1:35:15] Cameron McEwen: Both of the copies in Toronto are annotated,

[1:35:19] Cameron McEwen: not heavily annotated,

[1:35:21] Cameron McEwen: but annotated.

[1:35:23] Cameron McEwen: So he reads

[1:35:26] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead with

[1:35:28] Cameron McEwen: Rupert Lodge in

[1:35:30] Cameron McEwen: Manitoba.

[1:35:32] Cameron McEwen: And to my way of thinking,

[1:35:35] Cameron McEwen: he reads it enough that it sort of goes into his

[1:35:41] Cameron McEwen: RAM memory.

[1:35:45] Cameron McEwen: Then for the rest of his life,

[1:35:47] Cameron McEwen: he's got this stuff in there,

[1:35:49] Cameron McEwen: but he's constantly shifting it,

[1:35:53] Cameron McEwen: mostly unconsciously,

[1:35:56] Cameron McEwen: as to what the hell it means.

[1:35:58] Cameron McEwen: And he quotes and discusses science in the modern world many,

[1:36:05] Cameron McEwen: many times over the course of his life.

[1:36:09] Bob Dobbs: And he ends the medium is massage,

[1:36:13] Bob Dobbs: or maybe...

[1:36:14] Bob Dobbs: Fiore does with the quote from

[1:36:17] Bob Dobbs: Whitehead, the business of the future is to be dangerous.

[1:36:19] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that Whitehead?

[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:36:21] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:36:22] Cameron McEwen: sir.

[1:36:22] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:36:23] Cameron McEwen: But just listen to this.

[1:36:24] Cameron McEwen: Here is talking about pages in Science in the Modern World as sort of nonsense because there's so many different editions.

[1:36:33] Cameron McEwen: But in Chapter 3 of Science in the Modern World,

[1:36:39] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead quotes

[1:36:42] Cameron McEwen: Francis Bacon.

[1:36:44] Cameron McEwen: And it's from a book,

[1:36:47] Cameron McEwen: Silva Sevarum.

[1:36:48] Cameron McEwen: It was published immediately after

[1:36:51] Cameron McEwen: Bacon died in 1626.

[1:36:56] Cameron McEwen: And scholars of

[1:36:58] Cameron McEwen: Bacon think that he was writing it in the

[1:37:02] Cameron McEwen: 1620s. So this is Bacon as quoted by

[1:37:08] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead.

[1:37:09] Cameron McEwen: It is certain that all bodies whatsoever,

[1:37:13] Cameron McEwen: though they have no soul,

[1:37:14] Cameron McEwen: sense,

[1:37:15] Cameron McEwen: yet they have perception.

[1:37:18] Cameron McEwen: For when one body is applied to another,

[1:37:21] Cameron McEwen: there is a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate.

[1:37:32] Cameron McEwen: And whether the body be alterant,

[1:37:37] Cameron McEwen: alterant being that which alters,

[1:37:40] Cameron McEwen: or altered,

[1:37:41] Cameron McEwen: that which is altered,

[1:37:43] Cameron McEwen: Evermore a perception proceedeth operation,

[1:37:48] Cameron McEwen: for else all bodies would be alike one to another.

[1:37:53] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:37:54] Cameron McEwen: I'll just,

[1:37:55] Cameron McEwen: I'll go back to Bacon in a minute,

[1:37:57] Cameron McEwen: but

[1:37:59] Cameron McEwen: Whitehead then says,

[1:38:04] Cameron McEwen: note the careful way in which Bacon discriminates between perception or taking account of,

[1:38:11] Cameron McEwen: on the one hand,

[1:38:13] Cameron McEwen: and sense or cognitive experience on the other hand.

[1:38:19] Cameron McEwen: So here you have a definition coming first of all from Francis Bacon and then discussed by Whitehead differentiating between a percept

[1:38:34] Cameron McEwen: which is original and which is not part of cognition and

[1:38:42] Cameron McEwen: concept which is not original and which is part of cognition right yeah so when you're talking about the global theater when you're talking about the paleolithic hunter or something like this and how these and how the the earliest

[1:39:02] Cameron McEwen: of humans and perhaps the latest of humans are conducting perceptions

[1:39:11] Cameron McEwen: Perceptions are what is already there for humans if they attend it,

[1:39:24] Cameron McEwen: but it's plural.

[1:39:27] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:39:28] Bob Dobbs: in War and Peace he talks about needs before concepts.

[1:39:32] Bob Dobbs: Is that the same thing?

[1:39:35] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely,

[1:39:36] Cameron McEwen: absolutely.

[1:39:40] Cameron McEwen: Heidegger has whole essays on what is it to need.

[1:39:47] Cameron McEwen: What's involved in needing?

[1:39:49] Cameron McEwen: Is it only that I don't have something and I better get it?

[1:39:53] Cameron McEwen: Or is it a demand made on me?

[1:39:57] Cameron McEwen: Do I need to be somebody other than I am?

[1:40:01] Cameron McEwen: Do I need to communicate something that people need to know?

[1:40:07] Cameron McEwen: Do I need to find what I need to communicate?

[1:40:11] Cameron McEwen: Need is a very rich and difficult matter.

[1:40:16] Bob Dobbs: But,

[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: okay,

[1:40:17] Bob Dobbs: back to Buck.

[1:40:18] Bob Dobbs: So I think,

[1:40:19] Bob Dobbs: in my memory,

[1:40:20] Bob Dobbs: that Buck was the first to use the word percept.

[1:40:22] Bob Dobbs: Does that mean anything to you?

[1:40:25] Bob Dobbs: Does that sound familiar?

[1:40:27] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: he may,

[1:40:28] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:40:29] Cameron McEwen: Buck may have used the word.

[1:40:31] Cameron McEwen: He certainly wasn't the first to use it.

[1:40:33] Cameron McEwen: I was just reading from

[1:40:36] Cameron McEwen: Bacon talking about percepts as being original.

[1:40:41] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:40:42] Bob Dobbs: and he called it perception,

[1:40:44] Bob Dobbs: didn't he?

[1:40:46] Cameron McEwen: He called it what?

[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: Perception.

[1:40:47] Bob Dobbs: Did he say the word percept?

[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:40:50] Cameron McEwen: I don't know about that,

[1:40:51] Cameron McEwen: but percept was not an uncommon word,

[1:40:56] Cameron McEwen: Bob,

[1:40:57] Cameron McEwen: in earlier

[1:40:58] Cameron McEwen: English.

[1:41:00] Bob Dobbs: Okay, so what I'm thinking of,

[1:41:03] Bob Dobbs: somebody pointed out that other languages didn't have the word percept,

[1:41:07] Bob Dobbs: or vice versa,

[1:41:08] Bob Dobbs: that English didn't have it.

[1:41:09] Bob Dobbs: So

[1:41:10] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to leave that in abeyance and find out where that was,

[1:41:13] Bob Dobbs: but it was an interesting point.

[1:41:15] Bob Dobbs: that English or literate people didn't have the word percept.

[1:41:22] Bob Dobbs: Anyways,

[1:41:23] Bob Dobbs: that's not familiar to you,

[1:41:24] Bob Dobbs: so let's drop it.

[1:41:26] Bob Dobbs: So back to Bacon.

[1:41:27] Bob Dobbs: He's talking about needs before concepts,

[1:41:30] Bob Dobbs: and he's using the word perceptions,

[1:41:32] Bob Dobbs: right,

[1:41:33] Bob Dobbs: in what you quoted.

[1:41:34] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:41:35] Cameron McEwen: and perception in what Bacon's talking about is what might be called original articulation.

[1:41:43] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:41:43] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:41:44] Cameron McEwen: He says,

[1:41:45] Cameron McEwen: if you didn't have it,

[1:41:46] Cameron McEwen: all bodies would be the same,

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:41:50] Cameron McEwen: So all bodies have an original articulation.

[1:41:56] Cameron McEwen: And then as a development from this,

[1:41:59] Cameron McEwen: you could say that humans have a particularly complex original articulation.

[1:42:06] Bob Dobbs: And then overlaid is social media.

[1:42:11] Bob Dobbs: That's where people do become the same body.

[1:42:16] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:42:17] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:42:17] Cameron McEwen: In culture.

[1:42:18] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:19] Cameron McEwen: but we'd have to be careful there because there you're using media in a secondary sense,

[1:42:27] Cameron McEwen: whereas in most of our conversation today we've been using medium and media in an original sense,

[1:42:35] Cameron McEwen: fundamental sense.

[1:42:37] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:42:39] Bob Dobbs: Let's go into the next part that you want to develop in my book.

[1:42:45] Bob Dobbs: We're doing page 40,

[1:42:46] Bob Dobbs: then we jumped up to 70.

[1:42:48] Bob Dobbs: Do we go back to page 10 or something?

[1:42:51] Bob Dobbs: What's the next thing?

[1:42:52] Bob Dobbs: And maybe check your questions there you wrote.

[1:42:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:42:55] Cameron McEwen: my preference,

[1:42:57] Cameron McEwen: if it's okay with you,

[1:42:59] Cameron McEwen: is to go through,

[1:43:02] Cameron McEwen: to me,

[1:43:03] Cameron McEwen: the richest part of your book and very perceptive and interesting.

[1:43:08] Cameron McEwen: Are these pages between,

[1:43:11] Cameron McEwen: let's say,

[1:43:11] Cameron McEwen: 40 and 80,

[1:43:12] Cameron McEwen: and maybe especially between

[1:43:15] Cameron McEwen: 60 and 80?

[1:43:16] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:43:18] Cameron McEwen: Has to do with all of the sorts of things that we're talking about.

[1:43:21] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:43:21] Bob Dobbs: good.

[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:43:23] Bob Dobbs: so let's go to where you want to go in that stretch,

[1:43:26] Cameron McEwen: in that section.

[1:43:30] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:43:32] Cameron McEwen: One of the things I have to bring up with Clinton is that he needs...

[1:43:35] Cameron McEwen: to correlate the page numbers and the

[1:43:39] Cameron McEwen: PDF pages because any kind of talk about the book is difficult when those two things are different.

[1:43:50] Cameron McEwen: But let me go to PDF 38 and see if that's where I want to go with,

[1:43:58] Cameron McEwen: or it could be,

[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:44:02] Cameron McEwen: let's go to 38.

[1:44:04] Cameron McEwen: page 38 in the

[1:44:06] Cameron McEwen: PDFs.

[1:44:07] Bob Dobbs: Right, because I have one copy where the page numbers,

[1:44:14] Bob Dobbs: they go down in order,

[1:44:15] Bob Dobbs: but he has another version where one and two are beside each other.

[1:44:19] Bob Dobbs: Then you go back over to three on the left and you get three,

[1:44:22] Bob Dobbs: four.

[1:44:23] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you're talking about?

[1:44:25] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:44:25] Cameron McEwen: just in the

[1:44:29] Cameron McEwen: PDF that you sent me,

[1:44:32] Cameron McEwen: there's at the...

[1:44:33] Cameron McEwen: at the very top is the PDF page out of 189,

[1:44:39] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:44:39] Cameron McEwen: There's a page number,

[1:44:41] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:44:42] Cameron McEwen: 38,

[1:44:43] Cameron McEwen: and then slash 189.

[1:44:45] Cameron McEwen: And you can change the page number before the slash into anything you want.

[1:44:53] Cameron McEwen: But that number is always two higher than the number of the book.

[1:44:59] Cameron McEwen: Okay.

[1:45:00] Cameron McEwen: If you go to PDF 38 out of 189,

[1:45:04] Cameron McEwen: you end up on page 36 of your book.

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: I see.

[1:45:07] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:45:08] Cameron McEwen: And he can correlate those.

[1:45:10] Cameron McEwen: It's no problem to correlate them,

[1:45:12] Cameron McEwen: and that would be good.

[1:45:13] Cameron McEwen: Let me mention one other thing that I have to mention,

[1:45:18] Cameron McEwen: and that is that there's quite a few references in your book to the interior landscape.

[1:45:25] Cameron McEwen: And to me,

[1:45:28] Cameron McEwen: it doesn't make any sense to have references to the interior landscape as opposed to the essays in the book,

[1:45:34] Cameron McEwen: because if you have the essays within the book,

[1:45:38] Cameron McEwen: then you know the time that is being talked about.

[1:45:41] Cameron McEwen: Whereas if it's just like page 42 of

[1:45:44] Cameron McEwen: Interior Landscape,

[1:45:46] Cameron McEwen: you don't know what essay that is,

[1:45:47] Cameron McEwen: and you don't know what time it is.

[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: Well,

[1:45:49] Bob Dobbs: I thought I did that.

[1:45:50] Bob Dobbs: I would have both in there.

[1:45:52] Bob Dobbs: I'd give the essay and the year,

[1:45:55] Bob Dobbs: say,

[1:45:56] Bob Dobbs: published in 53,

[1:45:57] Bob Dobbs: within a bracket,

[1:45:59] Bob Dobbs: and then you'd go to page 35 in Interior Landscape to find it.

[1:46:04] Bob Dobbs: And that's 69.

[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:46:07] Cameron McEwen: it's not consistent.

[1:46:09] Cameron McEwen: But I would say there's more.

[1:46:12] Cameron McEwen: more references to interior landscape without reference to the essay than there is the other way.

[1:46:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:46:19] Bob Dobbs: I'll have to look at that.

[1:46:20] Cameron McEwen: It's not a big deal,

[1:46:21] Cameron McEwen: but it's just something that would,

[1:46:22] Cameron McEwen: if it were amplified,

[1:46:26] Cameron McEwen: it would just make the book more easy to deal with.

[1:46:32] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:46:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:46:34] Bob Dobbs: I'll bring it up with them.

[1:46:35] Cameron McEwen: So let's say on page 36 you have a nice phrase here,

[1:46:40] Cameron McEwen: Thank you.

[1:46:41] Cameron McEwen: You talk about,

[1:46:42] Cameron McEwen: you say in the middle of the page,

[1:46:47] Cameron McEwen: metaphor is a dimension of which we know nothing.

[1:46:51] Cameron McEwen: You could say that's tactility in McLuhan terms.

[1:46:55] Cameron McEwen: It's the interplay.

[1:46:57] Cameron McEwen: Now,

[1:46:58] Cameron McEwen: that's a very rich series of identifications,

[1:47:02] Cameron McEwen: and I agree with it wholeheartedly.

[1:47:07] Cameron McEwen: What you're saying there is that in...

[1:47:11] Cameron McEwen: metaphor or in tactility or in interplay there is a gap and you say that it's a dimension of which we know nothing and

[1:47:28] Cameron McEwen: it's for dimension you could even put the word nothing so you could say it's a nothing of which we know nothing okay

[1:47:38] Cameron McEwen: But as we go through these pages,

[1:47:40] Cameron McEwen: what we...

[1:47:41] Cameron McEwen: you talk a lot about tactility and about interplay and all this stuff.

[1:47:46] Cameron McEwen: And what,

[1:47:46] Cameron McEwen: to me,

[1:47:46] Cameron McEwen: what's very interesting about all this is that the you can see that if tactility is not one thing,

[1:47:56] Cameron McEwen: and even in the same paragraph you go on to describe different kinds of tactility,

[1:48:01] Cameron McEwen: if tactility is not one thing,

[1:48:04] Cameron McEwen: then it's possible to imagine a range of tactilities.

[1:48:09] Cameron McEwen: And then it...

[1:48:10] Cameron McEwen: it's possible to imagine that you might be able to define media as that range of tactilities.

[1:48:20] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:48:20] Cameron McEwen: In fact,

[1:48:21] Cameron McEwen: I think we can do that.

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:23] Bob Dobbs: that's what I was trying to get at,

[1:48:24] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[1:48:25] Bob Dobbs: 20 minutes ago,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: which you said,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[1:48:26] Bob Dobbs: we're going to talk about that.

[1:48:28] Bob Dobbs: You're right.

[1:48:29] Cameron McEwen: Cool.

[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:30] Bob Dobbs: my chart is five kinds of tactility shifts,

[1:48:34] Bob Dobbs: phase shifts.

[1:48:35] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:48:36] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:48:37] Bob Dobbs: five kinds of nothing.

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:48:38] Bob Dobbs: I'm just looking at the quote.

[1:48:41] Bob Dobbs: what does this,

[1:48:42] Bob Dobbs: I have here,

[1:48:43] Bob Dobbs: but by analogy,

[1:48:45] Bob Dobbs: that's a metaphor,

[1:48:46] Bob Dobbs: there are no more metaphors possible.

[1:48:48] Bob Dobbs: Is that the paragraph you're talking about?

[1:48:51] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:48:52] Cameron McEwen: Do you have your book up?

[1:48:53] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: no,

[1:48:54] Bob Dobbs: I'm looking at it and I'm reading page 36.

[1:48:58] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:48:58] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[1:48:59] Cameron McEwen: Maybe we have different versions.

[1:49:00] Cameron McEwen: Oh,

[1:49:01] Cameron McEwen: yeah.

[1:49:02] Cameron McEwen: On my page 36,

[1:49:04] Cameron McEwen: there is no quotation.

[1:49:07] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: it's blue,

[1:49:08] Bob Dobbs: it's me talking.

[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: yeah,

[1:49:11] Cameron McEwen: it's blue.

[1:49:12] Cameron McEwen: It's you.

[1:49:12] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:49:13] Bob Dobbs: So where is the sentence?

[1:49:18] Bob Dobbs: It is no longer even a dimension or perhaps it's a fourth dimension.

[1:49:21] Bob Dobbs: Is that what you had read a couple minutes ago?

[1:49:24] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:49:27] Bob Dobbs: They're trying to turn into a metaphor,

[1:49:29] Bob Dobbs: something that can't be made a metaphor,

[1:49:31] Bob Dobbs: that sentence?

[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: No.

[1:49:33] Cameron McEwen: If you,

[1:49:34] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:49:34] Cameron McEwen: under edit,

[1:49:35] Cameron McEwen: there's a find function,

[1:49:36] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:49:37] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:49:39] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[1:49:39] Cameron McEwen: so...

[1:49:41] Cameron McEwen: Look up interplay in the find function.

[1:49:44] Cameron McEwen: And that should get you to the same place.

[1:49:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:49:49] Cameron McEwen: Interplay,

[1:49:50] Cameron McEwen: one word.

[1:49:53] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:49:54] Bob Dobbs: that doesn't get me there.

[1:49:56] Bob Dobbs: It takes me to other pages.

[1:49:58] Bob Dobbs: So what's another word on the page,

[1:49:59] Bob Dobbs: a more unique word?

[1:50:01] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:50:02] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:50:02] Cameron McEwen: that's why I picked out interplay as being fair.

[1:50:04] Cameron McEwen: How about oscillates?

[1:50:06] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:50:07] Cameron McEwen: O-S-C-I-L-L-A-T.

[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:50:11] Bob Dobbs: I have here.

[1:50:12] Bob Dobbs: It oscillates between non-contact and contact?

[1:50:14] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:50:15] Cameron McEwen: That's right.

[1:50:16] Cameron McEwen: What page number?

[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:50:18] Bob Dobbs: that is

[1:50:28] Cameron McEwen: 36. Okay,

[1:50:29] Cameron McEwen: that's what I said before 36.

[1:50:31] Cameron McEwen: So something screwed up.

[1:50:34] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:50:34] Cameron McEwen: no,

[1:50:34] Bob Dobbs: I was reading up above that in 36.

[1:50:37] Bob Dobbs: So this part you're talking about is further down.

[1:50:39] Bob Dobbs: I hadn't seen that.

[1:50:41] Cameron McEwen: So do you have a quote on 36?

[1:50:44] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[1:50:44] Bob Dobbs: I'll read the whole thing.

[1:50:49] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[1:50:53] Bob Dobbs: on page 35,

[1:50:54] Bob Dobbs: it says at the bottom,

[1:50:55] Bob Dobbs: no longer order signal impulse message.

[1:50:59] Bob Dobbs: That's Baudrillard stuff,

[1:51:00] Bob Dobbs: right?

[1:51:02] Cameron McEwen: I guess so,

[1:51:03] Cameron McEwen: but I don't,

[1:51:05] Cameron McEwen: okay.

[1:51:07] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:51:08] Bob Dobbs: All these attempt to render the matter intelligible to us,

[1:51:11] Bob Dobbs: but they're not going to be able to do it.

[1:51:13] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:51:14] Cameron McEwen: But that's you.

[1:51:14] Cameron McEwen: That's not any quotation.

[1:51:16] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: But order,

[1:51:17] Bob Dobbs: signal,

[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: impulse,

[1:51:18] Bob Dobbs: message,

[1:51:19] Bob Dobbs: and quotes.

[1:51:19] Bob Dobbs: I think that's from

[1:51:21] Bob Dobbs: Beaujard.

[1:51:22] Bob Dobbs: Then, but by analogy,

[1:51:25] Bob Dobbs: I quote that.

[1:51:26] Bob Dobbs: Then I say that's a metaphor.

[1:51:28] Bob Dobbs: There are no more metaphors possible.

[1:51:30] Bob Dobbs: Then I quote him saying,

[1:51:32] Bob Dobbs: retranscribing in terms of inscription vector decoding.

[1:51:36] Bob Dobbs: a dimension of which we know nothing,

[1:51:39] Bob Dobbs: end of quote,

[1:51:39] Bob Dobbs: because,

[1:51:40] Bob Dobbs: next part,

[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:51:41] Bob Dobbs: it is no longer even a dimension,

[1:51:43] Bob Dobbs: and that's in quotations,

[1:51:45] Bob Dobbs: or perhaps it is the fourth dimension.

[1:51:46] Bob Dobbs: See,

[1:51:47] Bob Dobbs: that's all Baudrillard.

[1:51:48] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:51:49] Bob Dobbs: then he goes into Einsteinian definitions,

[1:51:53] Bob Dobbs: and I say,

[1:51:54] Bob Dobbs: but note it's,

[1:51:54] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:51:55] Bob Dobbs: the absorption of the distinct poles of space and time.

[1:51:59] Bob Dobbs: And then I go,

[1:51:59] Bob Dobbs: space and time are gone.

[1:52:01] Bob Dobbs: More dialectics gone.

[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: And O.

[1:52:04] Bob Dobbs: Gerard says,

[1:52:05] Bob Dobbs: all these attempts to render the matter intelligible to us,

[1:52:07] Bob Dobbs: but by analogy,

[1:52:09] Bob Dobbs: end of quote,

[1:52:10] Bob Dobbs: then I say,

[1:52:11] Bob Dobbs: they're trying to turn into a metaphor something that can't be made a metaphor because it's a dimension of which we know nothing.

[1:52:16] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:52:17] Bob Dobbs: And then I say,

[1:52:18] Bob Dobbs: you could say that's tactility in McLuhan terms.

[1:52:21] Bob Dobbs: You can't visualize it.

[1:52:22] Bob Dobbs: It's not a sense.

[1:52:23] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:52:24] Bob Dobbs: It's the interplay.

[1:52:26] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:52:26] Bob Dobbs: And you might say it's the second sight.

[1:52:32] Cameron McEwen: No,

[1:52:32] Cameron McEwen: I...

[1:52:34] Cameron McEwen: I wouldn't say it just like that.

[1:52:36] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:52:39] Cameron McEwen: I would say that's

[1:52:40] Cameron McEwen: ESP or that's the

[1:52:45] Cameron McEwen: Appelian form or digitality.

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:52:51] Bob Dobbs: What form did you say?

[1:52:52] Bob Dobbs: Appelian form?

[1:52:55] Cameron McEwen: Appelian.

[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[1:52:57] Bob Dobbs: the Appelian.

[1:52:58] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:52:58] Bob Dobbs: the Appelian.

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:52:59] Bob Dobbs: It's not a sense.

[1:53:00] Bob Dobbs: It's the interplay.

[1:53:02] Bob Dobbs: And Baudrillard's talking about how this interplay is very intimate.

[1:53:05] Bob Dobbs: And there's not even a gap between what's interplaying,

[1:53:07] Bob Dobbs: which is actually tactility,

[1:53:09] Bob Dobbs: half of tactility.

[1:53:10] Bob Dobbs: The other half is that there is contact.

[1:53:13] Bob Dobbs: So there's the shifting.

[1:53:15] Bob Dobbs: It oscillates between non-contact and contact.

[1:53:18] Bob Dobbs: Nothing is separating,

[1:53:19] Bob Dobbs: I'm quoting Baudrillard,

[1:53:20] Bob Dobbs: nothing is separating one pole from the other.

[1:53:23] Bob Dobbs: And he's saying that at the beginning,

[1:53:26] Bob Dobbs: there's no difference between cause and effect,

[1:53:28] Bob Dobbs: which is the way people think.

[1:53:30] Bob Dobbs: And then I say,

[1:53:31] Bob Dobbs: your thinking doesn't work anymore here.

[1:53:33] Bob Dobbs: You can't even begin to say

[1:53:35] Bob Dobbs: Bert is a human.

[1:53:37] Bob Dobbs: Bert is the actual guy I'm saying this to.

[1:53:39] Cameron McEwen: Okay,

[1:53:41] Cameron McEwen: let's back up just for a sec.

[1:53:42] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:53:44] Cameron McEwen: Later on,

[1:53:45] Cameron McEwen: you say that all of this commentary turns out to belong to the visual world.

[1:53:53] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:53:53] Cameron McEwen: And you're absolutely right about that.

[1:53:55] Cameron McEwen: So,

[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:53:56] Cameron McEwen: anybody listening to the tape,

[1:53:58] Cameron McEwen: they should know that you're...

[1:54:01] Cameron McEwen: quoting

[1:54:02] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard and you're discussing it,

[1:54:06] Cameron McEwen: but the voice in which you're discussing it is a self-conscious visual voice that you will then go on to recall,

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:54:18] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[1:54:19] Cameron McEwen: it's to say that,

[1:54:21] Cameron McEwen: you know,

[1:54:23] Cameron McEwen: nothing is separating one pole from the other,

[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:54:26] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[1:54:27] Cameron McEwen: in fact,

[1:54:28] Cameron McEwen: that nothing...

[1:54:29] Cameron McEwen: It is very real.

[1:54:31] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:54:31] Cameron McEwen: It's the gap where the action is.

[1:54:33] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:54:34] Cameron McEwen: But Baudrillard is saying if there's nothing separating them,

[1:54:38] Cameron McEwen: then there's only one pole.

[1:54:40] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[1:54:40] Cameron McEwen: So he's speaking out of a visual understanding.

[1:54:45] Bob Dobbs: Yep.

[1:54:46] Cameron McEwen: And you're citing it only to retract it later on.

[1:54:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:54:53] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[1:54:54] Bob Dobbs: would you say Cavell doesn't get that in his

[1:54:57] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan geography book?

[1:55:08] Cameron McEwen: I don't think he understands the gap,

[1:55:10] Cameron McEwen: put it that way,

[1:55:12] Cameron McEwen: in an appropriate way.

[1:55:14] Cameron McEwen: And that is...

[1:55:15] Cameron McEwen: so central to what's going on in McLuhan that that just distorts everything else he's saying.

[1:55:23] Cameron McEwen: He says that he knows a great deal about McLuhan.

[1:55:26] Cameron McEwen: He says a great deal that is correct or interesting,

[1:55:30] Cameron McEwen: but there's this sort of fundamental flaw that distorts everything at the same time.

[1:55:36] Bob Dobbs: And the way I'm writing this shows that I get it.

[1:55:39] Cameron McEwen: Give me that again.

[1:55:44] Bob Dobbs: the way I'm writing this,

[1:55:45] Bob Dobbs: what we're reading here that I'm saying,

[1:55:48] Bob Dobbs: shows that I get what you think tactility is.

[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: Yes,

[1:55:52] Cameron McEwen: I think so,

[1:55:53] Cameron McEwen: because number one,

[1:55:54] Cameron McEwen: you later retract what's going on here.

[1:55:58] Cameron McEwen: And secondly,

[1:56:02] Cameron McEwen: you're well aware,

[1:56:03] Cameron McEwen: like,

[1:56:04] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:56:05] Cameron McEwen: a dimension of which we know nothing,

[1:56:07] Cameron McEwen: you could say that's tactility,

[1:56:10] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:56:10] Cameron McEwen: So he says,

[1:56:13] Cameron McEwen: that the nothing is an absence.

[1:56:16] Cameron McEwen: It's what runs the poles together.

[1:56:19] Cameron McEwen: And then you specifically say this nothing is tactility.

[1:56:25] Cameron McEwen: And that's exactly right.

[1:56:28] Cameron McEwen: So you're saying that these citations can be used,

[1:56:34] Cameron McEwen: and they can be used in various ways.

[1:56:36] Cameron McEwen: They can be used,

[1:56:38] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:56:39] Cameron McEwen: Wittgenstein talks about an arrow that could

[1:56:43] Cameron McEwen: mean go in the other direction,

[1:56:46] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:56:46] Cameron McEwen: And so he says that if you want to understand arrows,

[1:56:50] Cameron McEwen: you've got to understand the language game,

[1:56:54] Cameron McEwen: or anti-environment,

[1:56:55] Cameron McEwen: you could say,

[1:56:56] Cameron McEwen: in which it's playing a certain role,

[1:56:59] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:56:59] Cameron McEwen: You can never just say that,

[1:57:01] Cameron McEwen: oh,

[1:57:01] Cameron McEwen: the arrow is pointing this way,

[1:57:03] Cameron McEwen: and that's the only possible meaning it could have.

[1:57:06] Cameron McEwen: That's ridiculous.

[1:57:07] Cameron McEwen: And that's what Richards and Eliot were saying about the history of poetry.

[1:57:12] Cameron McEwen: But in order to understand a word,

[1:57:15] Cameron McEwen: you have to understand the whole context,

[1:57:18] Cameron McEwen: and you have to understand the richness that great poets build into the words,

[1:57:25] Cameron McEwen: or at least recognize in the words,

[1:57:28] Cameron McEwen: and then are able to use that richness,

[1:57:32] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:57:33] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[1:57:34] Bob Dobbs: You got it.

[1:57:35] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[1:57:37] Bob Dobbs: I'll just read the next paragraph.

[1:57:38] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[1:57:39] Bob Dobbs: your thinking doesn't work anymore here.

[1:57:42] Bob Dobbs: You can't even begin to say,

[1:57:43] Bob Dobbs: Bert is a human.

[1:57:44] Bob Dobbs: No,

[1:57:45] Bob Dobbs: Bert's merged with technology.

[1:57:47] Bob Dobbs: There isn't any Bert.

[1:57:48] Bob Dobbs: I can't even address Bert or recognize when I'm addressing Bert.

[1:57:53] Bob Dobbs: He isn't a human.

[1:57:54] Bob Dobbs: He's a machine.

[1:57:55] Bob Dobbs: Then I have a quote from Baudrillard,

[1:57:57] Bob Dobbs: but nothing separates one pole from the other.

[1:58:01] Bob Dobbs: Then I say,

[1:58:01] Bob Dobbs: there's no initial and then a terminal.

[1:58:04] Bob Dobbs: There's no start here and go there,

[1:58:07] Bob Dobbs: quoting

[1:58:08] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard. There's just a sort of a contradiction,

[1:58:11] Bob Dobbs: end of quote.

[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: than I say.

[1:58:12] Bob Dobbs: In other words,

[1:58:13] Bob Dobbs: it's like looking at a heart pumping.

[1:58:14] Bob Dobbs: You can't follow the complex pumping of a heart.

[1:58:17] Bob Dobbs: There's just a contradiction within the pumping,

[1:58:20] Bob Dobbs: or what he calls,

[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: quote,

[1:58:21] Bob Dobbs: a contraction into each other,

[1:58:23] Bob Dobbs: a fantastic telescoping,

[1:58:25] Bob Dobbs: a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another,

[1:58:28] Bob Dobbs: an implosion.

[1:58:31] Bob Dobbs: And that's where

[1:58:32] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard influenced by McLuhan,

[1:58:33] Bob Dobbs: because McLuhan made the word implosion popular in his book.

[1:58:37] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[1:58:37] Cameron McEwen: but for McLuhan,

[1:58:38] Cameron McEwen: implosion is the

[1:58:41] Cameron McEwen: what makes intelligibility possible.

[1:58:44] Cameron McEwen: And for

[1:58:47] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard, it's what makes it impossible.

[1:58:50] Cameron McEwen: So there's a fundamental confusion there.

[1:58:53] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:58:54] Bob Dobbs: And that would be part,

[1:58:55] Bob Dobbs: that's where McClellan says,

[1:58:56] Bob Dobbs: communication and matching,

[1:58:58] Bob Dobbs: matching and communication doesn't happen often among humans.

[1:59:01] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[1:59:02] Cameron McEwen: Absolutely.

[1:59:03] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:59:03] Cameron McEwen: And for example,

[1:59:04] Cameron McEwen: for example,

[1:59:05] Cameron McEwen: at the bottom of 36,

[1:59:07] Cameron McEwen: the last sentence,

[1:59:08] Cameron McEwen: there's nothing to connect.

[1:59:10] Cameron McEwen: in tactile electric reality.

[1:59:17] Cameron McEwen: You know,

[1:59:18] Cameron McEwen: as you say,

[1:59:20] Cameron McEwen: that's a,

[1:59:22] Cameron McEwen: as you go on to say later,

[1:59:24] Cameron McEwen: that's a visual view of electric reality because the nothing,

[1:59:30] Cameron McEwen: that is to say the tactility,

[1:59:32] Cameron McEwen: that is to say the implosion,

[1:59:34] Cameron McEwen: is exactly what makes the new intelligibility

[1:59:39] Cameron McEwen: of the Marconi era.

[1:59:40] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[1:59:41] Cameron McEwen: Right.

[1:59:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[1:59:42] Cameron McEwen: A bit,

[1:59:43] Cameron McEwen: a bit.

[1:59:45] Cameron McEwen: always has a gap.

[1:59:47] Cameron McEwen: There's no such thing as a bit that doesn't have a one or a zero.

[1:59:52] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[1:59:53] Cameron McEwen: A plus or a minus,

[1:59:55] Cameron McEwen: right?

[1:59:56] Cameron McEwen: That's the very heart of computing is that gap.

[2:00:02] Cameron McEwen: And then,

[2:00:03] Cameron McEwen: and so in a,

[2:00:06] Cameron McEwen: a pelion,

[2:00:07] Cameron McEwen: in a little epic,

[2:00:09] Cameron McEwen: if you didn't have the gap,

[2:00:11] Cameron McEwen: you would have the epic.

[2:00:13] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:00:13] Cameron McEwen: Right?

[2:00:14] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:00:14] Cameron McEwen: Because

[2:00:16] Cameron McEwen: You need the two sides that cannot collapse in order to have the resonance.

[2:00:23] Bob Dobbs: Exactly.

[2:00:25] Bob Dobbs: So just to say,

[2:00:26] Bob Dobbs: after Baudrillard says an implosion,

[2:00:28] Bob Dobbs: I say,

[2:00:29] Bob Dobbs: and this is why McLuhan would say there are no connections in matter.

[2:00:33] Bob Dobbs: There's nothing to connect in tactile electric reality.

[2:00:36] Bob Dobbs: And then I say,

[2:00:38] Bob Dobbs: so Baudrillard is redoing McLuhan when McLuhan emphasizes tactility,

[2:00:43] Bob Dobbs: which can't be visualized.

[2:00:44] Bob Dobbs: You can't make any dialectic out of it,

[2:00:46] Bob Dobbs: but Baudrillard updating it to the Android Meme level of subatomic particles and genetic codes.

[2:00:52] Bob Dobbs: It's more modern.

[2:00:53] Bob Dobbs: It's more up-to-date than the technology McLuhan using.

[2:00:56] Bob Dobbs: Baudrillard is doing McLuhan,

[2:00:58] Bob Dobbs: but updating it and making people probably unable to understand it because they don't fully understand McLuhan.

[2:01:03] Bob Dobbs: I'm using Baudrillard to point out that you've got to figure out what McLuhan is saying.

[2:01:07] Bob Dobbs: That it points to this paragraph that Baudrillard is saying.

[2:01:10] Bob Dobbs: And because you don't understand McLuhan,

[2:01:12] Bob Dobbs: you don't understand what Baudrillard is doing.

[2:01:14] Bob Dobbs: You don't know that he is replaying McLuhan.

[2:01:17] Bob Dobbs: You wouldn't know that.

[2:01:18] Bob Dobbs: Nobody knows this unless you know in-depth McLuhan via Finnegan's Wake.

[2:01:22] Bob Dobbs: Does that make sense to you?

[2:01:27] Bob Dobbs: Sort of?

[2:01:27] Cameron McEwen: It makes sense,

[2:01:28] Cameron McEwen: but one of the differences between you and me is that

[2:01:33] Cameron McEwen: I could never write stuff like you have here.

[2:01:36] Cameron McEwen: It's more modern.

[2:01:37] Cameron McEwen: It's more up-to-date.

[2:01:39] Cameron McEwen: Baudrillard is doing McLuhan but updating.

[2:01:44] Cameron McEwen: To me,

[2:01:44] Cameron McEwen: all of that's linear,

[2:01:46] Cameron McEwen: and it's something that I hope in the course of discussing the book,

[2:01:51] Cameron McEwen: and even right now,

[2:01:53] Cameron McEwen: it's something that I hope to understand from you.

[2:01:57] Cameron McEwen: For me,

[2:01:58] Cameron McEwen: the linear in McLuhan is a very sort of secondary thing,

[2:02:05] Cameron McEwen: but you very much like the idea of updating.

[2:02:12] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:02:12] Bob Dobbs: I did a little.

[2:02:13] Bob Dobbs: You know,

[2:02:14] Bob Dobbs: McClellan once said,

[2:02:15] Bob Dobbs: I remember in September of 78,

[2:02:16] Bob Dobbs: he did a talk here in Toronto,

[2:02:18] Bob Dobbs: and I went to it,

[2:02:19] Bob Dobbs: it was a bunch of psychologists,

[2:02:21] Bob Dobbs: and he actually in the middle of it made a moral statement.

[2:02:24] Bob Dobbs: Now they seem to have known that he was legendary for not making moral statements,

[2:02:28] Bob Dobbs: and then he just said,

[2:02:29] Bob Dobbs: as an aside,

[2:02:30] Bob Dobbs: occasionally I slip a moral statement in.

[2:02:32] Bob Dobbs: Everybody laughed,

[2:02:35] Bob Dobbs: but that's what I do.

[2:02:36] Bob Dobbs: I slip in a little visuality every now and then.

[2:02:41] Bob Dobbs: Because it is a visual medium I'm communicating in.

[2:02:45] Bob Dobbs: And if you want a counter-visuality effect in reading,

[2:02:49] Bob Dobbs: you go to Finnegan's Wake,

[2:02:50] Bob Dobbs: which can't be linearized.

[2:02:52] Bob Dobbs: You can't do it.

[2:02:53] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:02:54] Cameron McEwen: right.

[2:02:54] Bob Dobbs: Do a couple of words.

[2:02:56] Bob Dobbs: So my alibi is the medium is the message here.

[2:03:00] Bob Dobbs: I am going visual.

[2:03:02] Bob Dobbs: It's a very distorted understanding of the present,

[2:03:06] Bob Dobbs: but people like this.

[2:03:09] Bob Dobbs: They like linearity.

[2:03:11] Bob Dobbs: or the web does.

[2:03:14] Bob Dobbs: They like linearity.

[2:03:17] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:03:19] Cameron McEwen: I'll just say I understand the strategy and maybe I even admire the strategy in some ways.

[2:03:26] Cameron McEwen: But for me,

[2:03:29] Cameron McEwen: when people like something,

[2:03:32] Cameron McEwen: it's almost always through the use of the rearview mirror and

[2:03:39] Cameron McEwen: It's not necessarily going to get them anywhere.

[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:03:42] Bob Dobbs: I'm aware of that.

[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: See,

[2:03:43] Bob Dobbs: I'm still in the cul-de-sac.

[2:03:45] Bob Dobbs: I have to stoop to conquer,

[2:03:47] Bob Dobbs: but

[2:03:48] Bob Dobbs: I fail.

[2:03:51] Cameron McEwen: We all fail,

[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: Bob.

[2:03:52] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:03:53] Bob Dobbs: right.

[2:03:54] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:03:54] Bob Dobbs: I want to end soon,

[2:03:55] Bob Dobbs: but I want to bring up this.

[2:03:57] Bob Dobbs: I don't know if I've ever talked about this with anybody,

[2:03:59] Bob Dobbs: but in Mechanical Bride,

[2:04:01] Bob Dobbs: he talks about at the end of the

[2:04:03] Bob Dobbs: 19th century,

[2:04:04] Bob Dobbs: I think he says in a kind of information overload,

[2:04:07] Bob Dobbs: he implies that,

[2:04:08] Bob Dobbs: but he doesn't say it.

[2:04:09] Bob Dobbs: Biology became a useful framing containing metaphor.

[2:04:13] Bob Dobbs: Do you remember that statement?

[2:04:15] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:04:16] Bob Dobbs: That's pretty important.

[2:04:18] Bob Dobbs: Biology is the end of visual space,

[2:04:21] Bob Dobbs: and that's the problem.

[2:04:23] Bob Dobbs: You study medicine,

[2:04:24] Bob Dobbs: you go to college,

[2:04:25] Bob Dobbs: you get expert on our biology,

[2:04:27] Bob Dobbs: but that hampers you for understanding the extended world that Lewis started to talk about,

[2:04:33] Bob Dobbs: the extension of our organs.

[2:04:35] Bob Dobbs: It's not biology anymore.

[2:04:37] Bob Dobbs: And that might get into second sight there,

[2:04:40] Bob Dobbs: or a collective second sight.

[2:04:45] Cameron McEwen: Why do you say that's not biology?

[2:04:46] Cameron McEwen: Because

[2:04:47] Cameron McEwen: I would have thought that you very much like the idea that the organic and life go together,

[2:05:00] Cameron McEwen: and presumably the organic,

[2:05:02] Cameron McEwen: life,

[2:05:03] Cameron McEwen: and biology all go together.

[2:05:06] Cameron McEwen: So

[2:05:07] Cameron McEwen: I don't understand why you would see that as constraining.

[2:05:13] Bob Dobbs: Because it's visual knowledge,

[2:05:15] Bob Dobbs: biology,

[2:05:16] Bob Dobbs: you know,

[2:05:16] Bob Dobbs: lungs and kidneys and what a medical student learns,

[2:05:21] Bob Dobbs: the anatomy.

[2:05:24] Bob Dobbs: Isn't that what biology is?

[2:05:25] Bob Dobbs: What is biology?

[2:05:26] Bob Dobbs: Is it just nature?

[2:05:28] Bob Dobbs: What is it?

[2:05:30] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:05:30] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:05:30] Cameron McEwen: number one,

[2:05:32] Cameron McEwen: like every other word,

[2:05:34] Cameron McEwen: it's got many meanings depending on how it's being used,

[2:05:38] Cameron McEwen: right?

[2:05:39] Cameron McEwen: I would say that the key to biology is the word bios,

[2:05:45] Cameron McEwen: which means life in Greek.

[2:05:48] Cameron McEwen: So if some sample were being studied only as chemical elements or chemical compounds and there

[2:06:03] Cameron McEwen: were no life to it,

[2:06:05] Cameron McEwen: that wouldn't be biology.

[2:06:06] Cameron McEwen: It would be chemistry.

[2:06:08] Cameron McEwen: organic chemistry.

[2:06:11] Cameron McEwen: So once biology is being studied,

[2:06:14] Cameron McEwen: that's the study of life.

[2:06:18] Cameron McEwen: And there are some nice quotations that you have in your book where you almost say that what's

[2:06:28] Cameron McEwen: ESP can be thought of as the working of life.

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: Yes.

[2:06:37] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:06:39] Bob Dobbs: the way he says the mechanical bride,

[2:06:41] Bob Dobbs: he's pointing out that that was a condition of knowledge,

[2:06:46] Bob Dobbs: Gutenberg knowledge,

[2:06:47] Bob Dobbs: the end of the

[2:06:48] Bob Dobbs: 19th century,

[2:06:49] Bob Dobbs: before we went into this strange new world of no six degrees of separation.

[2:06:55] Bob Dobbs: We didn't know where we were because visual space collapsed.

[2:06:59] Bob Dobbs: He is pointing beyond biology.

[2:07:01] Bob Dobbs: That's how I took it.

[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:07:02] Bob Dobbs: no,

[2:07:03] Bob Dobbs: I bet.

[2:07:05] Cameron McEwen: I mean,

[2:07:06] Cameron McEwen: that could well be the case because oftentimes for McLuhan,

[2:07:13] Cameron McEwen: the great biologist is Darwin.

[2:07:17] Cameron McEwen: And so if biology is cached in terms of the origin of the species,

[2:07:24] Cameron McEwen: this great linear passage that leads up to modern humans that neglects the missing link,

[2:07:32] Cameron McEwen: then,

[2:07:32] Cameron McEwen: of course,

[2:07:33] Cameron McEwen: biology is.

[2:07:34] Cameron McEwen: going to be just another word for the Gutenberg Galaxy.

[2:07:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:07:41] Bob Dobbs: So you know that...

[2:07:44] Cameron McEwen: That's what had to...

[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:07:45] Bob Dobbs: go ahead.

[2:07:46] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:07:49] Cameron McEwen: the number or the year,

[2:07:51] Cameron McEwen: 1900,

[2:07:53] Cameron McEwen: is very,

[2:07:53] Cameron McEwen: very significant for McLuhan because you have

[2:07:58] Cameron McEwen: Planck's constant as formulated that year.

[2:08:02] Cameron McEwen: The Interpretation of Dreams is published from Freud that year.

[2:08:07] Cameron McEwen: You have experiments in both music and painting,

[2:08:11] Cameron McEwen: and in fact also in sculpture,

[2:08:13] Cameron McEwen: that are breaking with the

[2:08:17] Cameron McEwen: 19th century traditions.

[2:08:19] Cameron McEwen: So what

[2:08:21] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan is saying is that right at the turn of the century,

[2:08:28] Cameron McEwen: in practically all fields,

[2:08:31] Cameron McEwen: you have this

[2:08:31] Bob Dobbs: bursting of the old molds the old what molds yes the old mold yeah right now um doesn't he say in gumorgalzi about tired to chardon that he discovers

[2:08:48] Bob Dobbs: a biological that electricity is a biological event you remember that statement uh yes i think i do yeah um but he i'm trying

[2:09:00] Cameron McEwen: I'm trying to think of where,

[2:09:02] Cameron McEwen: either in your book or in an essay I read recently,

[2:09:06] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan says something like

[2:09:11] Cameron McEwen: Teilhard got hung up on chronology.

[2:09:16] Bob Dobbs: Yeah.

[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay.

[2:09:18] Bob Dobbs: So

[2:09:19] Bob Dobbs: I thought I had another idea,

[2:09:20] Bob Dobbs: but basically tied to Chardon,

[2:09:22] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan very carefully gives the McCudos for pointing out that electricity is a biological event.

[2:09:28] Bob Dobbs: So there it is.

[2:09:29] Bob Dobbs: fitting into biology the way you mean it.

[2:09:31] Bob Dobbs: It's new life.

[2:09:33] Bob Dobbs: But science,

[2:09:36] Bob Dobbs: education treats it as a visual metaphor,

[2:09:39] Bob Dobbs: a visual model.

[2:09:42] Bob Dobbs: McLuhan main point by saying anti-environment are organic and alive,

[2:09:48] Bob Dobbs: he's saying we're more than our

[2:09:50] Bob Dobbs: 3D bodies.

[2:09:52] Bob Dobbs: That's the new issue here.

[2:09:54] Bob Dobbs: And then that gets into

[2:09:56] Bob Dobbs: ESP, what you can't see.

[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: Oh yeah,

[2:09:59] Bob Dobbs: and the other one is the big discovery of the

[2:10:03] Bob Dobbs: 19th century is the missing link or the gap.

[2:10:06] Bob Dobbs: People think it's electric.

[2:10:10] Bob Dobbs: It's a 20th century discovery,

[2:10:12] Bob Dobbs: but it actually was already there in the

[2:10:14] Bob Dobbs: 19th century.

[2:10:15] Bob Dobbs: Right,

[2:10:16] Cameron McEwen: but he nearly always says that they expended their energies avoiding it.

[2:10:21] Bob Dobbs: Yes,

[2:10:22] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[2:10:24] Bob Dobbs: But they were fascinated by it.

[2:10:26] Cameron McEwen: Of course it was there.

[2:10:28] Cameron McEwen: McLuhan would go on to say you can't possibly have a percept without it,

[2:10:33] Cameron McEwen: for the very reasons that we were just discussing,

[2:10:35] Cameron McEwen: because all percepts entail tactility.

[2:10:39] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:10:40] Bob Dobbs: So he says they're fascinated by it,

[2:10:43] Bob Dobbs: and that would be the modern knowledge,

[2:10:46] Bob Dobbs: the postmodern guys,

[2:10:47] Bob Dobbs: they talk about fascinated with the other.

[2:10:50] Bob Dobbs: So the gap is there in the 19th century,

[2:10:53] Bob Dobbs: and everybody's fascinated with it,

[2:10:54] Bob Dobbs: but they don't know what to do with it.

[2:10:55] Bob Dobbs: So it's the other.

[2:10:57] Bob Dobbs: And then they can deal with it,

[2:10:59] Bob Dobbs: and it becomes a major factor in quantum mechanics or quantum physics because the anti-environment has made it knowable,

[2:11:06] Bob Dobbs: so to speak.

[2:11:08] Cameron McEwen: Right,

[2:11:09] Cameron McEwen: right.

[2:11:10] Cameron McEwen: And at the very same time,

[2:11:12] Cameron McEwen: music is experimenting with different scales,

[2:11:17] Cameron McEwen: and in painting,

[2:11:19] Cameron McEwen: painters are experimenting with different chromatics,

[2:11:25] Cameron McEwen: and all of these gaps are entailed.

[2:11:29] Bob Dobbs: Right.

[2:11:30] Bob Dobbs: Like he says in Take Today,

[2:11:31] Bob Dobbs: art tends to go towards science,

[2:11:34] Bob Dobbs: and science tends to go toward art in the 20th century.

[2:11:38] Bob Dobbs: You could say that's tactility entering into the Gutenberg Galaxy and its categories.

[2:11:44] Cameron McEwen: Correct.

[2:11:45] Bob Dobbs: Now,

[2:11:45] Bob Dobbs: I think we're way beyond that now in our mixed media,

[2:11:52] Cameron McEwen: social media.

[2:11:53] Cameron McEwen: I don't believe in beyond.

[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: Oh,

[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: yeah,

[2:11:56] Bob Dobbs: that's right.

[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:11:57] Bob Dobbs: so what am I trying to say?

[2:11:59] Bob Dobbs: To adapt it to your preferences.

[2:12:03] Bob Dobbs: I think we've got Stucker more than they got stuck 100 years ago.

[2:12:09] Bob Dobbs: We got even a worse cul-de-sac.

[2:12:14] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:12:17] Bob Dobbs: And that's what's going to lead to the collisions that are coming now in our institutions.

[2:12:25] Bob Dobbs: There's a major war or warfare going on.

[2:12:28] Bob Dobbs: There's already been war,

[2:12:30] Bob Dobbs: but we're watching this loom in the United States right now.

[2:12:34] Bob Dobbs: What kind of civil war is it going to be?

[2:12:37] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:12:39] Bob Dobbs: And that brings us up to the day.

[2:12:41] Cameron McEwen: Yeah.

[2:12:42] Cameron McEwen: Well,

[2:12:42] Cameron McEwen: that's probably a good place to leave it off,

[2:12:46] Cameron McEwen: and we can take that up further at another time.

[2:12:51] Bob Dobbs: Yeah,

[2:12:51] Bob Dobbs: probably in a week.

[2:12:52] Bob Dobbs: These are really fantastic discussions.

[2:12:55] Cameron McEwen: Yeah,

[2:12:55] Cameron McEwen: I enjoy them a lot,

[2:12:56] Cameron McEwen: and I'm learning a lot from you,

[2:12:58] Cameron McEwen: so thank you for that.

[2:13:00] Bob Dobbs: And I'm learning a little bit from you.

[2:13:05] Bob Dobbs: But the...

[2:13:06] Bob Dobbs: Let's hope it all got recorded.

[2:13:08] Cameron McEwen: Yes.

[2:13:10] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:13:10] Bob Dobbs: so let's,

[2:13:12] Bob Dobbs: you hang up and then I'll stop the recording.

[2:13:14] Bob Dobbs: So great,

[2:13:14] Bob Dobbs: thanks a lot,

[2:13:15] Bob Dobbs: Cameron.

[2:13:16] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:13:16] Bob Dobbs: Bob,

[2:13:16] Cameron McEwen: talk to you later.

[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: Okay,

[2:13:18] Bob Dobbs: bye.

[2:13:19] Cameron McEwen: Bye-bye.